Six Black Women on the Meaning of Juneteenth

BY REBECCA CARROLL

Leave it to Texas to pretend they didn’t hear that slavery was over. While the Emancipation Proclamation was passed in 1863, the then-still border state of Texas was like, “What? No, uh-uh. We don’t know her.” On June 19, 1865, though, Union troops arrived in Galveston to take control of the state and make sure that all enslaved people were freed. That day became Juneteenth, a holiday commemorating the official abolishment of slavery. A holiday for us—for Black folks.

One hundred and fifty years later it’s now a commercial holiday—used in brand campaigns and Walmart’s failed ice cream—and I feel ambivalent about that. What’s to prevent it from turning into another MLK Day or Black History Month, both of which feel more like lip service as opposed to an actual appreciation of what we’re meant to be commemorating? I mean, this is America: How can we trust the country built on the backs of Black folks—a country that continues to be as happy-pants racist as it wants to be—to honor the day we got free?

So, yes, I have questions and concerns about Juneteenth, but I also really wanted to find a way to commemorate it in a meaningful way. I decided to talk to a group of brilliant Black women—writers, creatives, and artists—to offer some perspective on the holiday.

First, about that commercialization. Do you think it has undermined the historical value of Juneteenth for Black folks in America? 

“Juneteenth will remain a significant holiday—because of its symbolic meaning and historical legacy—regardless of recent commercialization efforts. We live in a capitalist society, which means that we can almost always expect companies to exploit holidays—and just about anything—to yield a profit. Plus, it is certainly easier for companies to sell goods and services than to find concrete ways to redress past harms or address current discriminatory practices. Still, I am encouraged by the swift public response when companies go too far. It’s a reminder that we can play a key role in demanding better from those that drop the ball.”

–Dr. Keisha N. Blain, professor Africana studies and history at Brown University 

What would be the best possible reason for the hashtag Juneteenth to go viral? 

“The best reason for #Juneteenth to go viral [would be] Black Americans actually receiving meaningful reparations for the enslavement of our ancestors, because we know that will not happen in 2022. The second best reason for #Juneteenth to go viral [would be] the announcement that the rich history of Black Americans since they were brought to these shores in bondage, will be taught in schools. No longer just a paragraph about Martin Luther King and how enslaved Africans were akin to migrant workers, all students would learn how we built this country. I don’t see that happening either, so how about #Juneteenth goes viral because all Black people get the Friday closest to June 19th off from work? Just us.”

–April Reign, equity and inclusion advocate, and creator of #OscarsSoWhite

What is the single most important thing to get right about Juneteenth as a journalist?

“Journalists should speak of Juneteenth as an ‘is’ instead of a ‘was.’ It’s not a siloed moment of history. What it represents—the willfully delayed emancipation of Black people—speaks directly to this perilous time and the denial of our rights. It must also be framed within the context of anti-CRT/American history laws that will gut the significance of Juneteenth by erasing from libraries and classrooms the nearly 250 years of chattel slavery that preceded it.”

–Renée Graham, journalist and opinion columnist for the Boston Globe 

What’s funny about Juneteenth? 

“It’s ‘hilarious’ that we finally have a national holiday to celebrate our freedom, yet we’re still not truly free.”

–Yvette Nicole Brown, actress (Big Shot) and TV host

If you were making a playlist called Juneteenth, what 10 songs would be on it?  

Alright - Kendrick Lamar

A Chance to Say My Piece - Taylor McFerrin

Formation - Beyoncé

This Is America - Childish Gambino

My People…Hold On - Eddie Kendricks

Can You See? - Madison McFerrin

Every Nigga Is a Star - KeiyaA

Say It Loud - I’m Black and I'm Proud - James Brown

Post Black Anyway - THEESatisfaction

Baltimore - Nina Simone

–Madison McFerrin, singer/songwriter

Why is Juneteenth important to you as a mother? 

“Black history is American history. But in our house, what I tell my daughter is that Black history is also a master class in hope. To me, Juneteenth matters because it says: ‘Keep going, the future you want is coming.’”

–Veronica Chambers, editor of narrative projects at The New York Times, and author of Shirley Chisholm is a Verb

by Rebecca Carroll

Why Everyone Online is Having Such a Ball Trashing Amber Heard

I believe Amber Heard. I can’t make you believe her if you don’t. But for fuck’s sake, this case isn’t some metaphorical trip to Vegas where everything you do and say about this trial will stay there. It has already made the world a much scarier place for people who’ve been targeted by abusers, and a much friendlier place for abusive assholes who are right now selecting their next victims. Survivors don’t ever get a vacation from our trauma. So you don’t get a vacation from trying to teach yourself to care.

---

Jaclyn Friedman is a writer, educator, activist, and the founder and Executive Director of EducateUS: SIECUS In Action, a brand-new advocacy organization working to build a national movement of sex-ed voters. She is the creator of four books, including her latest, Believe Me: How Trusting Women Can Change the World. (Photo by Gene Reed)

by The Meteor

Min Jin Lee on Justice for Asian Americans

By Samhita Mukhopadhyay

Min Jin Lee has been sounding the alarm on the startling rise of anti-Asian violence for the last few years. And the award-winning author has been unapologetically “extra Asian” lately. In March of this year, on the one-year anniversary of the tragic shooting at a spa in Atlanta where eight people (six of them Asian women) were killed, Lee helped organize a nationwide #BreaktheSilence action demanding justice for Asian women. Through tears, she addressed the rally in Times Square: ”We have read the data, but I want to know how you are doing in light of such dismal and terrifying hate?” 

The data paints a grim picture: the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism found that anti-Asian hate crimes were up 339% in 2021. In light of these startling statistics, actor, writer, activist, and Meteor founding member Amber Tamblyn wanted to hear from Lee—and understand how non-Asians can be allies. They sat down to talk about anti-Asian violence, movement-building, and what it means to create a culture of “grace.”

Amber: I've seen [the work] you’re doing to expose racism and violence—which is permeating both our culture and literally our streets, against Asian American elders. And I wonder if you would just talk a little bit about that and your experience fighting to bring more awareness to the violence that is happening in your community right now?

Min Jin: I think that is one of the reasons why I am speaking so consistently about the insult and the assault and the murders of Asians and Asian Americans in this country right now. There's been an upsurge of such violence in the past several years, especially in light of the Trump administration. However, this kind of discrimination and exclusion has been happening, even by the state, ever since Asians and Asian Americans have been in this country. 

Amber: I’ve read that the Asian American community in the US is one of the lowest communities to report violence and to report these assaults. And I was shocked by that statistic, but I [realize] it's not so simple, [because] of the complicated relationship our country has with its police force.

Min Jin: There are so many, many poor immigrants in this country who are terrified of speaking up for fear of affecting their immigration status, for fear of affecting their jobs. And [many] even think that they don't have the right to complain. They come from countries in which political persecution is so commonplace. [So] very often the victims won't come forward for fear of persecution—and the persecution may not exist, but in their minds, it's quite present. 

So one of the things that I'm just trying to do is to bring greater awareness, to talk about it when I can. I'm asking the media to please pay attention to this situation. Part of it is representation, and part of it is telling the truth about how the economic disparity in our community is so, so wide. We have the poorest people in America, and we have some of the wealthiest people in America. So the idea [that] all Asian Americans are wealthy and educated is so completely, statistically, factually untrue. And if I could bring that to bear, then maybe I've done a little bit of truth-telling.

Amber: Watching the work that you have created in the last couple of years—both as a writer and a researcher, at the nexus of thrilling storytelling and unearthing these really hard truths—has been pretty profound. This is where, in my mind, for women, it’s not really a luxury to write about these things: This is not a hobby; this is an act of survival. How do you feel about that statement? 

Min Jin: I think the word “survival” is so important because right now we are seeing girls and women under threat—especially poor girls and poor women, and that cuts across race, and it cuts across boundaries, and regions. We're seeing political actors trying so hard to destroy the lives of girls and women. And I guess that's the reason why I feel rather impassioned to make sure that our alliances get stronger, not [made] weaker by minor differences that we can definitely talk out.

Amber: I love that so much. And I needed to hear that because it has been a hard couple of years, as it has been for everybody. Obviously, I've dealt with my own feelings about the movement-building process and activist spaces that feel like we're just ripping each other apart without the context of nuance and how difficult this work is. There is a world out there that just wants us not to exist and not to thrive. And also on a deeper, sadder level, not to love each other.

What you just said reminded me of this episode [of the On Being podcast] I just listened to [featuring] my friends Tarana Burke and Ai-Jen Poo. And there's a thing that Tarana said: "I don't think we can have movements that have liberation politics that don't have a politic of grace."

Min Jin: Amen. It should be exactly as Tarana Burke said, a “liberation ethic,” because it's not just me getting whatever men get. It's actually for all of us to be free to be who we're supposed to be. And that's a very revolutionary point of view.

Amber Tamblyn: What I've learned is, in any [movement] work, there's a very delicate balance between honoring the wisdom and experience of your elders, and also breaking free of that to find what is important and needed in the current culture and climate.

Min Jin: Well, it's funny, I'm 53 years old. I'm the middle girl of three girls in my family. My mother always worked and she earned money for our family, which was important. But then also I felt that our father really supported our full capacity as young women. So very often people talk about the patriarchy of East Asian Confucian cultures, and obviously, true. But my father— because he has three girls—I think he ended up feeling like, yes, I want you to be able to cook well. Which is obviously sexist. And yet, he also felt like you should be able to do whatever you want to do because my girls are the best.

He used to say, "Oh if a boy doesn't want to marry you or date you because you're smart and you're educated, know this: He will have dumb children." 

Amber: Oh shit. That's amazing.

Min Jin: Right? But my dad said that! I grew up in a very feminist household. So I'm always surprised when people say things about Asians and Asian Americans being sexist, because I'm like, "Well, that wasn't my experience."

Amber: That brings me to my [last] question that I wanted to ask you personally, but also for anyone reading this interview who's also upset and outraged by [the rise of anti-Asian violence]. What is a very simple way to be more involved, to be more engaged? 

Min Jin: The Alliance is an organization that supports victims [of anti-Asian violence] who wish to come forward. If they don't have money for a lawyer, they have all these pro bono lawyers who are willing to do it. But very often the victims will not come forward. I think that you understand this very well as somebody who cares about the Me Too movement, [but] very often Asians and Asian-Americans are not believed. So, first of all, can you believe it when someone tells you, I'm afraid to take the subway, I'm afraid to walk down the street because somebody might attack me in a poor neighborhood? Secondly, find the [political] candidates who care about the core of your community.

The third thing is really simple: Sometimes, if you feel like it, you could offer to walk your friend somewhere. Sometimes it is a matter of reaching out, talking to the person who feels deeply ignored, [and] making him, or her, or them visible in your life. There are moments in recognition that we can give to each other, which can build a world and counteract all that cruelty. 

Amber: I love that. What gives you hope about the future? 

Min Jin: Well, I'm a mother and I'm a professor of young people, so the next generation obviously gives me hope. And what also gives me hope is that I come from a long history of women who are fighting for good things. And it's so important to understand that we're not alone in this. For me, I keep thinking about how many beautiful friendships I have found in the movement, [and] how many people I really adore, whose laughter I speak to when I'm having a hard time. Having a shared, common purpose is a wonderful way to build friendships. So that gives me a lot of hope.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

by The Meteor

The Rest of the Story Behind America's Labor Movement

By Esther Wang

Labor journalist Kim Kelly’s new book, Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor, comes at the perfect time, as enthusiasm for labor unions is at the highest point in decades, and workers from Amazon warehouses to Starbucks stores are demanding more—better pay, dignity on the job, and a say in their workplace. Her book goes beyond the simplified history we’re exposed to in textbooks (and that’s if we’re lucky) to tell a fuller, and therefore more true, story of the labor movement, as well as our country. Her message? “This is your history, too,” Kelly said. “And it’s also our future.”

Esther Wang: You started off your book by acknowledging the enormous debt the labor movement owes to women—immigrant women from countries all over the world, Black women, and queer and trans women. Why did it feel necessary and important to tell those stories?

Kim Kelly: I wanted to focus specifically on women just because we're so often left out of the equation when it comes to writing about labor and labor history and the idea of the working class and what a worker looks like in this country. There's this enduring avatar of the working class in this country that is the straight white guy and a hard hat. And he belongs here, he's done a lot of great work, too. My dad is that guy. But if you look at the actual composition of the labor movement, the most common face of a union member in this country is a Black woman who probably works in home health care or domestic work. It's not even a shift—it's kind of always been like that.

You include the stories of labor activists like Dorothy Bolden, Rosa Flores, and Ella May Wiggins. What would it mean for all of us if we looked to those women as labor leaders from the past? 

I think it would reframe a lot of the perceptions of what organized labor and collective power look like. Dorothy Lee Bolden started working as a domestic worker when she was nine years old. She's visually impaired. She grew up in the forties and fifties in the South as a Black woman. So she had every possible disadvantage, but she managed to overcome those obstacles that were unfairly thrown her way. She made history in a way that was so incredible, the way that she organized and worked and advocated for domestic workers [as the founder of the National Domestic Workers Union of America].  At its height, it had about 10,000 members. They organized to win fair wages and to professionalize household work. They were people that were seen as unorganizable. And they're like, well, we'll just organize ourselves.

Ella May Wiggins, who died on the picket line, who was this balladeer who was the heart and soul of a strike down in Gastonia, she's another Joe Hill. She's another Billy Bragg. Rosa Flores was this 18-year-old woman who ended up being the face of an entire massive strike for being this militant presence, for seeing what the world offered her as a young Chicana woman and was like, well, that's not good enough.

That is the kind of energy that we need to be bringing to the labor movement. That's the kind of energy that it always had, but it's been buried under white patriarchal bullshit.

You make it so clear and so apparent that labor issues, workers’ rights, and the fight for a union are intertwined with so many other issues—Black liberation, immigrant rights, feminist battles, disability rights. They’re not silos. 

One of the greatest truths that we have found to be evident over and over and over again throughout the history of labor and work in this country is that solidarity between workers is the greatest weapon that we have. And solidarity means obviously standing up for people that are on your side, but also people that maybe don't look like you or talk like you or come from the same background, but are also dealing with the ravages of capital, dealing with bad bosses, dealing with mistreatment.

I think every story is a labor story because wherever you're coming from, wherever you're going, whoever you are, you've probably either had a job or you have a job now, or you're going to have a job. And that common ground really is a uniting force.

There’s so much momentum and energy in labor right now, stemming from the successful Amazon unionization drive, the workers organizing Starbucks, the mining families on strike that you've been following for more than a year in Alabama at Warrior Met Coal. How are you thinking about what's happening?

History is being made right now, from Amazon to Starbucks, to Appalachian coal mines, and in North Hollywood strip clubs. There's momentum. And I think it's just been very inspiring for folks that maybe for a long time thought there wasn't any hope, or maybe thought that there wasn't any room for them in the labor movement. To go back to Amazon and Starbucks, those movements have been led predominantly by Black workers and workers of color, young queer workers, a lot of women, nonbinary people—the exact workers that common wisdom or whatever has told us are not organizable. They are organizing, and they're winning.

by Esther Wang

On turning women's pain into entertainment

By Tracy Clark-Flory

This week brought the finale of Hulu’s Pam & Tommy, a limited-series dramedy about the leak of a private sex tape that none of us should know anything about. We’re talking eight whole episodes reenacting the '90s-era theft and viral spread of an explicit home movie starring celebrities Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee. That’s more than five hours of television devoted to replaying a privacy violation.

The tape’s leak in 1995 was paradigm-shifting and emblematic of a cultural moment, so it’s possible to imagine a worthwhile critical retrospective. Instead, Pam & Tommy is less a reconsideration of the leak than a nostalgic reliving of it. It’s less about the tape than of the tape, which ushered in an ongoing era of stolen moments treated as entertainment.

Anderson and Lee's video was historic as the first celebrity sex tape, spawning dozens of direct imitations, but also setting the stage for whole new privacy violations, like the 2014 hack targeting famous women’s nudes (a.k.a “The Fappening”). The tape’s leak teed up an explosion of nonconsensual entertainment online—and not just starring celebrities. Soon, everyday women had to reckon with the public humiliation of everything from “upskirting” videos to “revenge porn.” Fast forward over two decades and the majority of states have had to legally address nonconsensual pornography (or nonconsensual image abuse, as some experts now call it). The next challenging legal frontier: “deepfake porn”, where a person’s face is seamlessly swapped onto pornographic material. 

But let's be clear: leaked sex tapes aren’t really about sex. The most famous ones—as with Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian—are defined by entitlement, trespass, violation, and embarrassment, vis-à-vis a woman. This is a fundamental part of the attraction: these videos provide forbidden access. Kevin Blatt, a self-described celebrity sex tape broker, says the appeal is seeing something you “weren't supposed to see.” Even when there are questions about a sex tape being leaked for fame and publicity, there's still the suspension of disbelief that allows viewers the fantasy of crossing boundaries, of getting what is not freely given. The entire meaning of the tape changes if a woman intentionally and openly participates in its creation and release. 

We’re living in a cultural moment of re-evaluation around the sexism of the ‘90s and ‘00s, which no doubt helped greenlight Pam & Tommy, but the show’s true impulse is to laugh and wax nostalgic

Pam & Tommy itself adds another layer of non-consent to the original violation of the tape’s leak: Anderson wanted nothing to do with the series. (While Lee has voiced support for Pam and Tommy, Anderson reportedly finds its release “very painful.”) The show was made anyway—and then promoted as “feminist” for being sympathetic to her experience. 

In reality, the show identifies at the start with Rand Gauthier (Seth Rogen), the contractor who stole the tape after remodeling the couple’s mansion. We’re given a comedic, rollicking justification for the theft: Tommy Lee (Sebastian Stan) is an over-the-top asshole clad in a banana hammock who barks unreasonable orders at Rand. These early episodes are driven by laughs—take the scene where Tommy has a conversation with his own penis, which talks back via cringey animation. 

We’re living in a cultural moment of re-evaluation around the sexism of the ‘90s and ‘00s, which no doubt helped greenlight Pam & Tommy, but the show’s true impulse is to laugh and wax nostalgic.  

The series does eventually get around to inviting identification with Pam (Lily James), instead of literal and figurative dicks. It depicts Pam’s struggle to be taken seriously as an actor as her Baywatch lines are cut to prioritize zoomed-in shots of her butt. After the sex tape is leaked, Pam & Tommy spotlights her pain, portraying Pam as having a devastating miscarriage amid the stress of the violation. 

In many of the moments of Pam’s emotional fallout, the show and the tape uncomfortably converge. Pam & Tommy feels like an unintentional meta-commentary on the many ways we are entitled to, and entertained by, women’s pain—not just with leaked sex tapes but also with limited-run TV series dramatizing leaked sex tapes. 

Pam & Tommy is less a reconsideration of the leak than a nostalgic reliving of it. It’s less about the tape than of the tape, which ushered in an ongoing era of stolen moments treated as entertainment

Eventually, Anderson is shown in a brutal and shaming deposition for her lawsuit against Penthouse’s Bob Guccione, as she tries to stop the magazine from publishing stills from the tape. She is cross-examined about her sex life and even forced to watch parts of the tape in a room packed with men. We’re meant to feel outraged, but that outrage arrives after Pam & Tommy has already had its giddy fun. 

The tone-deafness of the first half of the series is only matched by the inappropriateness of its handling of partner violence. Though it’s not depicted in the series, Lee was sentenced in 1998 to six months in jail for felony spousal abuse following an incident in which Anderson accused him of kicking her while she held her 7-week-old son; she had “a broken fingernail and red marks on her back,” according to police. 

The series portrays several early red flags in the relationship—like Tommy calling Pam non-stop and following her uninvited on a trip to Mexico—but treats them as fun material. Pam & Tommy leaves Lee’s arrest, and their divorce, as a literal postscript at the end of the series. It’s a sanitized version of events, referring only to “a physical fight in the couple’s kitchen.” Hulu has cheekily promoted the show as “the greatest love story ever sold.”

All these years later, it’s tempting to believe that we have enough perspective to critically revisit this long-ago sex tape leak and other misogynies of yore. Instead, the last two decades have created a convenient new cover for exploitation: Pam & Tommy delights in replaying the violation, only to abruptly pivot toward superficial wokeness. It makes claims of a redemptive narrative while risking retraumatizing one of its subjects. Ultimately, the show is an accidental testament to the many ways women’s suffering is consumed as entertainment.

You can call it “reflection,” but we’re not nearly as far away from these events as we might like to think.

Tracy Clark-Flory is the author of the coming-of-age memoir Want Me: A Sex Writer's Journey into the Heart of Desire (Penguin, 2021), a New York Times “notable” book and NPR best book of the year. For over 15 years, Clark-Flory has reported on feminism, gender, pop culture, and sex.

by The Meteor

What does a Black agenda look like?

“The glaring omission of Black experts is so commonplace across Western society that it has become normalized,” writes Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman in the opening pages of The Black Agenda: Bold Solutions for a Broken System. A graduate student at the Harvard Kennedy School, Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, wants to raise her hand and ask one monumental question: “why public discourse about a global pandemic, which disproportionately impacted Black communities, was largely absent of Black perspectives.” The collection of essays she compiles explores the "convergence of at least three pandemics: Covid-19, racism, and state-sanctioned police violence," and how each of those things affects sectors like climate change, tech, and healthcare in Black communities. (In one expansive section about the climate crisis, Dr. Marshall Shepherd writes, "Ultimately, however, the weather-climate gap will not disappear until racial wealth inequality disappears.”) 

So what does a Black agenda look like? Let's talk to the editor!

Shannon Melero: The Black Agenda kicks off by noting that historically, Black experts are only ever called upon for things specifically about the Black community—or when someone is trying to get their DEI initiative up and running. There was a slight shift in this during the summer of 2020, which you write about. Have you noticed any change in the academic or research community moving toward no longer pigeonholing Black experts two years into the pandemic?

Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: No. No. (Laughing) And it’s really because at the end of the day, as Doctor Tressie McMillan Cottom said recently, institutions can’t love you. Right? They’re things. And it’s no surprise. What I always tell people to keep in mind, with academic institutions, in particular, is that they were never built with Black and Brown people in mind. Harvard was founded in the 1600s. Where were Black people in the 1600s? So the way I really look at it is that, yes, institutions can’t love me. They won’t serve me. But that being said, I’m still going to push these institutions to at least see me, to hear me. Because at the end of the day, even if they aren’t hearing me, someone is listening, right? 

One thing I noticed as a thread joining all of the essays was the argument for reparations. But what would you say is that one thing that brings all these experts’ concepts together? 

Oh, reparations. I hadn’t even thought about it from that perspective, but you’re right, it does come up a lot. But I actually think the more salient or more obvious trend between the essays is criminal justice. 

Just to be clear, nobody talked to each other before writing their essay. But as you see, criminal justice comes up again and again and again. Because at the end of the day, that is the root of a lot of the problems. If you already don’t see Black life as life, we have a problem. We can’t talk about voting rights. We can’t talk about health care reparations; we can’t talk about diversity in the workforce; we can’t talk about the future of work in the U.S. if you don’t think Black people are people. 

And so the way that manifests is criminalizing Black people for existing. I can’t just be Black and exist because that is illegal. As I talk about this, I’m just thinking about what happened with Kim Potter recently. She basically got a slap on the wrist and the judge cried! 

The statistic that shook me, and it still shocks me, is that out of 17,500 police killings between 2005 and 2021, only 140 officers were indicted in murder or manslaughter charges. That’s less than one percent! That’s actually 0.8 percent, to be precise. And the question becomes, well, when it’s fundamentally criminal to be Black in America, how does that spill over into every other sector of society? It’s illegal to be Black in America, and for some reason, that’s not top of mind for everybody. 

So I guess the next logical question is, what’s the plan? It feels like this has been an ongoing battle for hundreds of years. How can we change this perspective, and is it even something that’s going to be accomplished in our lifetime? 

I think it can. And I think it will be led by young people, I think we are going to be the ones to push against this idea in a very real way. That’s why you’re seeing such a visceral reaction. There are a lot of people who are trying to get rid of Black voting rights—I mean, it’s a coordinated effort that is giving Battleship precision, right?

There are entire generations of people who are sick of it. You’re seeing this [anger] in millennials, Gen Z, Gen X, and all of the people coming up after them. This is why you have this entire fight around what’s going to be taught in schools, however, because people [in power] understand that once young people find the truth, it changes everything. We saw that with Gen Z. 

And what does implementing that level of change look like according to The Black Agenda?

It looks like putting Black people at the helm of conversation and having them lead the way. And that’s not at the expense of any other group. I think a lot of times people argue that if you’re centering one group of people, it means you don’t like anybody else. But who said that? What we’re saying is, what groups have it worse off? The group that is worse off should probably be leading the conversation around solutions because if a solution works for them, it’ll probably work for everyone else. 

I can't just be Black and exist because that is illegal.

Now when we talk about agenda items in the book, what we’re saying is that with the way that things are going, Black lives have to be fully realized first and foremost. The fact that Black lives do matter is not something that should be up for debate, but right now it is up for debate. It doesn’t make any sense to me. Like, what do you mean? This isn’t debatable. The Black Agenda basically feeds off of the idea that if we know that Black life matters, we can address how the climate crisis is affecting Black lives, we can address health inequities, we can address how climate crises are affecting Black lives. 

But you have to agree that Black life matters first. If you can’t agree with that fact then all of the other solutions proposed in the book are moot. The first step is you agreeing that Black people are people.

by Shannon Melero-Urena

"I didn't want to be curated into whiteness"

One year after Rebecca Carroll's memoir, the white gaze lingers

A year ago, I published the work I am more proud of than anything I’ve ever written—Surviving the White Gaze, my memoir about growing up as a Black child adopted into a white family, and raised in an all white, rural New Hampshire town. Every memoir writer knows that mining the truth can be a fraught and risky endeavor, and I certainly anticipated some fallout, hurt feelings, differences in remembrance. I could not have imagined, though, how keenly the response from my family would reflect not merely the truth in the book’s pages, but also the truth of America. 

My mom called it a gift, until my dad called it an injustice, and then she agreed with him that they should consider hiring a lawyer to sue me. Their accusation: defamation of character. Their issues were not with me writing about the racism I endured during my youth, which went almost entirely unacknowledged within my family, but rather, with how I wrote about them; their unconventional marriage, my father’s ego. (He was upset that I’d included the fact that earlier in my life, I had misguidedly suggested there had been some blurred lines between us; I was wrong and said so in the book, but he still felt it was damaging to his reputation.)

I had invited my dad to read the book when it was still in manuscript form, when changes could still be made, but he had declined, which I can’t deny hurt my feelings deeply. We were very close when I was growing up—made countless mixtapes for each other, stayed up watching Late Night with David Letterman together, and shared a love for gallows humor, Swiss-German expressionist artist Paul Klee, the swoony crooning of Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music, romance languages, and romance in general. I absolutely worshiped him. 

When I left for college, we maintained a fiercely dedicated written correspondence, dad’s letters characteristically endless in page count, handwritten in his tiny, exquisite penmanship, detailing his findings in the local swamps and wetlands, his sanctuary, where he still spends hours finding and tracking painted and spotted turtles. But as I got older and grew more into myself as a Black woman, the more it became clear that I no longer fit within the narrative he had created for our relationship, and more broadly speaking, for our entire family. 

Like many white male artists with outsized egos, my dad affected a microcosm wherein he, the infallible genius and hopeless romantic, existed at its center, buoyed by the near constant presence and adoration of women. It was a racially segregated space, into which I had been placed through careful, well-intentioned curation. But I didn’t want to be curated into whiteness, idyllic as it may have seemed to my parents and siblings. I wanted to be Black among Blackness. How was this never made available to me? I stopped worshiping and started questioning. And then I started to get angry. Why hadn’t my father tried to connect me with my community? 

And, of course, it wasn’t just my dad. My mom sewed me a Black doll and found me a Black dance teacher. But still—my dance teacher was the first Black person I had ever seen in real life. I was six years old. I didn’t go to a Black hair salon until I was 12 years old. My first real Black friend wasn’t until college. My book grappled with those realities—it expressed my love for my parents, but also my anger. It expressed my reality, as lived and experienced by me. And they were outraged. 

Twitter was making it clear: White parents get to decide how a family is made

It’s an outrage I’ve come to know too well. In December 2021, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments from state attorneys seeking to uphold Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban. In her remarks, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, herself the white mother of two Black adopted children from Haiti, suggested that abortion isn’t really even necessary when adoption is right there. I found her remarks hideously cavalier, a callous trivialization of the complexities surrounding adoption, particularly transracial adoption, and the responsibility white parents take when they adopt Black children. I launched a thread on Twitter (as one does) saying so. The thread outlined the ways in which I believe transracial adoption can be seen as representative of the foundational dynamic between Black people and white people in America, which is inherently traumatic. It was retweeted thousands of times, but the backlash was swift.

My comments were full of endless fury. One (based on her avi) white woman tweeted: “TRAUMA???? What would the trauma had been if you were still with your birth mother? How the fuck UNGRATEFUL can one person be. Disgusting.” A white guy whose Twitter bio includes “just a dude” wrote: “So the argument is... it's better for black children to be aborted than adopted by white people? I'm not sure a lot of black children would agree, but, I'm no expert.” 

Perhaps the most egregious responses came from right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza, who tweeted: “If it’s ‘enduring trauma’ for you to be adopted by a white family, you might consider that 1. The black patents [sic] that gave birth to you didn’t want you 2. There were evidently no black couples that chose to adopt you. Aren’t you grateful someone did?” 

Twitter was making it clear: White parents get to decide how a family is made. It’s the very essence of America, where white parents, both figurative (the forefathers) and literal (adoptive parents), have set the standard of everything. And if you are a Black child who is lucky enough to be part of that construct—taken in either from foster care or, in my case, by a handshake agreement between your parents and the white teenage girl who was pregnant with you—well, you had better feel grateful. 

Imagine presenting what you consider to be your career-best work, an impassioned plea to be seen, only to have your parents condemn it because of bruised egos. 

Now try to think of one moment throughout history when this same dynamic hasn’t played out similarly, if not exactly, between Black and white America.    

My parents did not sue me—there were no grounds—but ironically, their threat made me feel more Black than I’d ever felt before. It felt like a reminder that in America, if you are white, you can arbitrarily decide what constitutes an injustice, while threatening to bring law and order down upon anyone who says otherwise—in this case, a Black woman who wrote her story into existence. 

If not for the support of the family I made and chose, generous reviews, and the overwhelmingly positive response from readers—of all different backgrounds, but in particular Black and biracial transracial adoptees, and other transracial adoptees of color—I might have thought it was all for naught. But they wrote me, in droves.

“I feel a little taller, less broken, less angry and grateful to be in this black skin,” wrote one of the adoptee DMs and emails I received. “Thank you for this book...from the whole entireness of my heart. I have to go cry now.”

Hard same.

by Rebecca Carroll

Six months of the Taliban

Two Afghan journalists on what life is like for women there now, as told to Mariane Pearl

Six months ago next Tuesday, Kabul fell to the Taliban, plunging Afghanistan’s citizens, but especially girls and women, into panic and despair. Rukhshana Media is one of the very few woman-run media outlets in the country; its two founders, Zahra Joya (shown above) and Zahra Nader, now live in exile, working 18 hours a day to ensure coverage of the systematic oppression of women at the hands of the Taliban. I spoke with these extraordinary journalists in late January over Zoom.

MP: Rukhshana Media, the news agency you created, is named after a victim of Taliban oppression. Can you tell us about her, and why you started the agency? 

There are only 100 female journalists left in Afghanistan (out of 700 before last August). You have reporters working inside Afghanistan and rely on volunteers. Can you explain how people bring stories to you? And are they in danger?

ZN: They are not quite volunteers because we insist on paying our collaborators. Women have lost their jobs [since the Taliban took over], so this is also a way of encouraging them to join us and speak out. Some of the women now working with us are not journalists; they were students or teachers, so we train them on the job.

ZJ: Right now, we have four female journalists and two men inside Afghanistan. We are looking for someone to cover the Eastern region, but the situation there is beyond control. Despite the danger, our reporters are doing remarkable work. In February alone, they wrote about two abducted women’s rights activists, the ban on women’s voices and music, and how former security forces fear being hunted down when applying for passports, among other critical reporting. We are constantly tracking our collaborators, making sure they are okay, but we don’t want them to take risks. Journalists themselves need to decide. No story is worth a human life, but the cost of an untold story is also very high.

ZN:  If we need to contact Taliban officials for comment, we do it exclusively from abroad. One time, I made such a call, and the next day, two women contacted me, pretending they needed help; these calls came from the Taliban trying to measure my vulnerabilities.

“No story is worth a human life, but the cost of an untold story is also very high.”

Afghanistan has one of the youngest populations on earth, with 63% of its people under the age of 25, meaning most Afghans don’t remember what life was like under the Taliban, which held power over roughly three-quarters of the country from 1986 to 2001. Do you have any memories of life under Taliban rule?

ZJ: I was nine when the Taliban left. In order to go to school, I had been dressing up as a boy and called myself Mohammad. The ’90s were particularly harrowing for women. Now at least we have platforms, social media, and networks. They didn’t have any of that then. My mother told me there was no bread on the table. They didn’t even know that there were doctors and clinics that could save their lives.

ZN:  When the Taliban came the first time around, I moved to Iran, where I wasn’t allowed to go to school [because I was a refugee]. The concept of home became a very big deal. The day my parents told me we were going back was the best of my life. I went to school and held my head high. To me, school meant change—the Taliban were in history books, a mere nightmare from the past. We were a generation that was going to change this country for the best.

Where were you last August, when the Taliban took Kabul? 

ZJ: That first day, I went to the office as usual, but my colleagues told me to leave immediately, so I went back home. The only thing I was able to grab was my diary. I was evacuated to London three days after the takeover. I lost everything.

ZN: I was working on a story about women’s reactions to the Taliban. Suddenly on television, I saw one entering the presidential palace in Kabul. I knew they were coming, but that image brought it home. I didn’t think it would happen so fast. I sat there just crying. It wasn’t only the fall of a country I was witnessing; it was the death of the hopes of my generation.

The Hazara community to which you both belong is being specifically persecuted by the Taliban. What do we know about Hazara women and what is happening to them?

ZJ: We have always been discriminated against. Many Afghans believe that we don’t belong there as we are mostly Shia Muslims, and the majority [of Afghans are] from the Sunni sect of Islam. And if you are a Hazara woman, you are buried under several more layers of discrimination between your ethnicity and your gender. 

Yet, as journalists, we are very conscious about not letting labels and nationalism prevent us from representing all women.

The Taliban promised to respect women’s rights “according to Islam.” But “according to Islam” is a vague, and in this case threatening, formulation, as the interpretation of the Quran is complex and varies widely depending on the individual. 

 ZN: In May 2021, I asked the Taliban to define what they considered women’s rights. Every Muslim country has its own interpretation of how women should live. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran—they are all different. The Taliban never answered the question or defined anything. But they are slowly pursuing their agenda and imposing a very narrow interpretation of Islam.

The word “misogyny” lacks the power to represent their ideology towards women. One of the first Taliban decrees stated that “women are human beings.” They actually had to wonder about that.

How at-risk are the women who were most visible during the last 20 years? Journalists, of course, but also women working in the armed forces, as lawyers or activists?

ZN: Rukhshana is doing everything we can to answer that question. We hear about so many stories of women being killed but often we can’t run them because we can’t reach anybody to confirm the facts. When we can talk to the family, friends or relatives, we reach out to the Taliban and they simply deny responsibility: They say these women have died because of family feuds. How is it possible that so many public, visible women are suddenly all dying from family feuds? It’s so easy for Talibans to find and execute these targeted women. All the public data, fingerprints, census and personal information are in their hands now.

“The word 'misogyny' lacks the power to represent [the Taliban's] ideology towards women.”

In January 2022, a delegation of Taliban was hosted in Oslo to speak with world representatives. Officially, the meeting was to address the economic crisis, but activists see that meeting as a first step towards legitimizing the Taliban government. What do you think?

ZN: When we challenge the fact that the Taliban should not be invited to the world table, we are told that Afghanistan has too many problems. That we should resolve the economic crisis first, then we can talk about women. But how do you resolve starvation if half of the country is under house arrest? I was saddened by the lack of protests from the Norwegian people, who ultimately paid for the expenses of that meeting.

How can the international community help Afghan women?

ZJ: The best way is to put pressure on your governments, to tell the world that you disagree with what is happening. Ultimately, this is about all women and the way we can be treated when men are at their worst. Show what you stand for, challenge inertia. Another way is to support Afghan women who are now outside the country. You can help them help us.

Read Rukhshana Media here, and follow them on Twitter here.

Mariane Pearl is an award-winning journalist and writer who works in English, French, and Spanish. She is the author of the books A Mighty Heart and In Search of Hope.

by Mariane Pearl

Sara Nelson is the labor leader we need

Journalist Esther Wang speaks to the Flight Attendants Union President about the future of the labor movement

Sara Nelson, the charismatic head of the nation’s largest flight attendants’ union, loves the word “strike.” During our 50-minute conversation recently, Nelson, who’s often described as America’s “most prominent labor leader,” used the term no less than a dozen times. It’s fitting, as it was her invocation of a general strike, uttered in January 2019 during a speech that subsequently went viral, that helped to end Donald Trump’s government shutdown. “Strike, strike, strike, strike, strike, strike, strike. Say it—it feels good,” she once proclaimed in the New York Times. A strike is a reminder of the ultimate power that workers possess—the power to withhold their labor and their time. In embracing it, Nelson is a bit of a throwback, and maybe also a figurehead that the U.S. labor movement needs in this particular moment.

Her industry needs her too. Flight attendants have been on the frontlines of the pandemic, and subject to shocking levels of abuse and at times physical violence from irate passengers. Last year saw a 500 percent increase in the number of violent incidents on airplanes, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. In May 2021, to cite just one example, a Southwest Airlines flight attendant was punched by a woman after she asked her to put on her mask and follow other safety procedures. And airline executives have only made the lives of flight attendants more miserable, furloughing and laying off staff disproportionately, and pushing to reinstitute alcohol sales on planes.

The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA began a union drive at Delta shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic, but it picked up steam in December 2021 after the airline publicly pushed the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to reduce its recommended quarantine period for people with breakthrough infections—a move that Nelson described as “brazenly choosing the economy over workers’ lives.”

She and the AFA-CWA immediately went on a media blitz. “This wasn’t just about being critical of the CDC and Delta,” which had pressed the CDC for the change, Nelson said. “This was about being as loud as we could” to “spread the word to workers everywhere and get it into everyone’s consciousness—do not force people to come back to work.” As for Delta, the company eventually budged, amending its original policy in response to the union’s criticism. “They didn’t give us credit for that, but they changed their policy,” Nelson said, more than a hint of satisfaction in her voice.

Flight attendants aren’t alone in their demands for the safer workplaces and fairer pay that they—and all of us—deserve. Workers across industries are increasingly fed up, fueled by the indignity of being pandered to as “essential workers” even as they were being thrown to the wolves. During the pandemic, “what we saw was a consistent view of workers being disposable,” Nelson said. “And so now workers are like, listen, it’s not just that there’s all this inequality,” she said. “You don’t even give a damn about our lives. You don't care if we live or die.” To Nelson, there is “a recognition that nothing is going to change if we don't change it collectively.” This, she says, explains why support for unions is at its highest point in decades, and the flurry of unionization drives at Starbucks stores and Amazon warehouses. “Workers are saying, ‘Wow, the only way to take on someone who could be a trillionaire—and who leaves the rest of us with a burning Earth as he shoots off to Mars—is to organize in our workplace,’” Nelson said.

That’s the hope, at least. What has been dubbed the “Great Resignation”—a turn of phrase that neatly captures the mood of millions of Americans—is less a mass movement than a whole lot of individuals fed up and finding better jobs. But while workers may have a little more negotiating power now, that can change quickly. (Better pay and benefits, as anyone who has been sexually harassed on the job knows, are not the only markers of a decent workplace.) “The only way these gains are lasting is if we organize in the millions,” Nelson told me.

"And so now workers are like, listen, it's not just that there's all this inequality. You don't even give a damn about our lives. You don't care if we live or die."

I asked Nelson what she would tell someone who wanted to bring that Norma Rae spirit to her own job—a working mom, for example—but was unsure where to begin. “Join unions, run unions. It’s that simple,” she said. If your workplace isn’t unionized? “Figure out how to organize one.” Easier said than done, but Nelson, who began her career as a flight attendant in 1996 before becoming the president of her union in 2014, is keenly aware of how unions can transform the lives of women. She recalled going to the White House in 2012 for a forum on women and the economy, where much of the discussion centered on closing the gender wage gap. At one point, she raised her hand to speak. “And I said, ‘You know, we’ve talked about the wage gap all morning. But why have we not talked about the one thing that would immediately close the wage gap and give women power in their workplace and give women power to actually collectively bargain, and bargain for their worth together? Why have we not talked about making it easier for women to join unions?’” According to Nelson, silence ensued. “And the moderator waited a minute, and then just called on someone else. And that was it.”

A lot has changed in the decade since. Fast-food workers are organizing for a union not just to raise their wages, but to combat pervasive sexual harassment. In June, Nelson may challenge current AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler for the federation’s top job. (“That's something that feels like a real calling and a duty,” she told me when I asked, declining to give a definitive answer.)

And in the meantime, she says she loves the work. “I just have to share with you that my day started off right today, because the first thing that I got was a picture of Delta flight attendants over at the Starbucks in Atlanta, where they’re organizing,” Nelson told me, her voice cracking with emotion. The name one of the flight attendants gave the barista for her order? “Solidarity.”

by Esther Wang