Hi, and welcome to the day after the State of the Union. Last night, Biden was in prime presidential form, which is to say his face was beat to the gods. On the issues, well—aside from his support of Ukraine, which included a solemn and moving ovation for UN ambassador Oksana Markarova, for me, his big shining moment was when he spoke up to defend trans kids and their parents via the Equality Act (though, as the journalist Katelyn Burns pointed out, the Equality Act won’t be passed as long as the filibuster exists).

Generally, I liked what Rep. Rashida Tlaib said in response to the speech: that Biden should use his executive powers to cancel student debt and reduce carbon emissions, and everyone needs to get back to enacting Build Back Better (which of course won’t *presses rewind* happen as long as the filibuster exists). Also, I learned that a lot of powerful people (including the President) still don’t know what Defund the Police actually means.

But more on that in the news below, along with Shannon Melero’s look at the current TV trend—via Inventing Anna and Hulu’s upcoming Elizabeth Holmes show—of pinkwashing female white-collar criminals with a girlboss sheen.

Hope that you and yours are well and safe.

—Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

WHAT'S GOING ON 

• The Russian military continues to batter Ukrainian cities in its full-scale war; according to the Kyiv Independent, the State Emergency Service estimates that over 2000 Ukrainian citizens have been killed so far, and both Ukrainian citizens and Russian troops are reportedly running out of food. Russian bombs have damaged residential buildings, schools, hospitals, and the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial, which commemorates the site where 33,000 Ukrainian Jews were murdered by Nazis.

• Meanwhile, Nigerian and Indian students attempting to escape Ukraine have been met with racism at the border and on trains, and trans Ukrainians find themselves unable to flee, fearful of transphobic attacks at the border if their gender identity does not match what’s on their passports. Disabled people, too, are having difficulty leaving Ukraine, according to Tanya Herasymova, who spoke here about what it was like to leave Ukraine while using a wheelchair.

• On Wednesday afternoon, the UN General Assembly condemned the Russian invasion and demanded Putin remove his troops; after President Zelensky filed suit at the Hague accusing Russia of war crimes, the International Criminal Court launched an investigation.

• The world’s outpouring for the crisis in Ukraine is entirely appropriate. But as many have pointed out, it’s hard not to feel dismayed at the way similar situations in non-white, non-European, or non-Judeo-Christian countries are largely ignored by the same media outlets that are covering the war in Ukraine 24/7. And in some cases, the coverage has been outright racist, with white newscasters emphasizing that this is “different” because the civilians affected “look like us.” The Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association (AMEJA) issued a condemnation of this racist coverage, as did the Foreign Press Association, Africa. So let’s do better by all affected populations; after all, in the last two weeks, the U.S. bombed Somalia, the Israeli military killed four Palestinians, including a 14-year-old boy, and the Afghan and Yemeni people are starving as a result of war there. To help refugees around the world, you can donate to Save the Children, the UN Refugee Agency, the International Rescue Committee, or Doctors Without Borders.

• Back to Ukraine: it’s been helpful to hear journalists remind us that it’s not a “conflict” or even a “war between” the countries: It’s Russia’s war on Ukraine. (And it’s not Kee-ev, which is the Russian pronunciation; it’s Kee-yiv, the way  Ukrainians pronounce it themselves.)

• Meanwhile, in the United States: the ACLU has filed its first lawsuit against Gov. Greg Abbott’s anti-trans decree, which encourages “child abuse” investigations into parents offering gender-affirming care to their trans kids. The ACLU is representing a plaintiff who works for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services—the actual agency tasked with investigating parents of trans kids—and who was placed on leave and investigated for supporting her own trans daughter. (And she’s not the only parent already being targeted, reports journalist Melissa Gira Grant.) One of the most reassuring voices heard this week was that of Dr. Megan Mooney, the Texas psychologist also named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit. She told The Guardian’s Katelyn Burns (again), that she’s advising her patients to “stay calm... I’m not reporting you, nobody is reporting you, and there are huge groups of people planning to support you and take care of you as always here in the state of Texas and elsewhere.” Bless everyone looking out for these kids and parents.

  AND:

• Latina curators are making their mark in America’s art museums

• HBO will air a new documentary about the 2017 death of Swedish journalist Kim Wall, who was murdered by a man she was interviewing in his submarine. Watch the trailer here, and if you’re unfamiliar with her remarkable journalism, you can read about that here.

• How Asian Americans changed fashion forever

• The New York Times printed a photograph of Venus Williams in a story about Serena Williams. (And, secondarily, referred to the best athlete of all time as, simply, “Tennis Star.") Politely, what the actual fuck? 

• Jessica Cisneros, the awesome young lawyer trying to unseat Rep. Henry Cuellar in South Texas, is headed to a primary runoff election in May. Cuellar is not only being investigated by the FBI, he is the last remaining “Democrat” in the House of Representatives who is anti-abortion. So this is one of the big races to watch. Did I mention Cisneros is awesome?

—JES

CRIME TIME

The Yas Queenification of White Women Scammers

There’s a reason we’re so fascinated with Anna Sorokin

BY SHANNON MELERO

JULIA GARNER AS ANNA DELVEY, JUDGING YOU FOR YOUR OUTFIT (IMAGE VIA NETFLIX) 

In 2018, when every New York glossy started covering the escapades of Anna Sorokin—a young woman who had defrauded her “friends” and several financial institutions (including City National Bank) by posing as a German heiress named Anna Delvey—I largely ignored it. The woes of New York’s elite monied classes simply weren’t of interest to me—that part of New York is so disconnected from what I know as a native New Yorker that it may as well be a fantasyland. If those over-educated Patagonia vest wearers got conned by some girl, that was their business. I saw no reason to engage with the Anna Delvey news cycle.

Ultimately, the joke was on me: Recently, I spent an entire weekend glued to Netflix’s Inventing Anna, a fictionalized version of the New York magazine story that first broke the news of Sorokin’s crimes. After a solid two days of talking at my husband (he didn’t watch, so I had to reenact some scenes for clarity) about all the different angles the series covers, it occurred to me that the whole thing functions as a bit of a Rorschach test: Is the viewer looking at a criminal or just a misunderstood girlboss?

If you haven’t seen the show or read the articles, think-pieces, and best-selling book about Anna Delvey, here’s the quick and dirty. Delvey got herself one step away from securing a $25 million loan from a bank to fund what she called the Anna Delvey Foundation, her concept for an exclusive social club for the mega-wealthy in New York. To create the illusion that she was a wealthy German heiress and hide the fact that she had no money and nowhere to live, Delvey (born in Russia) stayed in some of the most expensive hotels in New York City and skipped the bill at nearly every single one. She was arrested twice in 2017 for failure to make payment, and was ultimately found guilty of almost all of the charges brought against her, including first-degree attempted grand larceny, theft of services, and second-degree grand larceny—just to name a few. It is an incredible crime story that not even the writers’ room of Law and Order could have conceived, but what’s more fascinating is the story that came after the story: The heroic myth of Anna Delvey.

CONTRARY TO POPULAR BELIEF ANNA WAS NOT CHARGED FOR THE CRIMINAL ACT THAT IS THIS EYELINER/MATTED LASH COMBO (IMAGE VIA NETFLIX)

Shaping the latest retelling of this myth is Inventing Anna creator Shonda Rhimes, who’s constructed a series that deals in a certain degree of subtle manipulation. One episode at a time, it chips away at the perspective that Sorokin is a scammer who got off easy (she served the minimum length of her sentence), giving her just enough girlboss and pseudo-feminist rhetoric to imply that maybe, just maybe, she was simply a savvy business person faking it till she made it.

What Inventing Anna manages to portray so expertly is the iron grip that girlbossery had over the masses during the 2010s, when Anna began her climb to and subsequent fall from the top. She is a scammer; there's no two ways about it. But her scam worked thanks to one nefarious aspect of girlbossology: because she is a white woman who came from nothing and almost created a social club without a dime to her name, she enjoyed a unique benefit of the doubt from bankers, hotel managers, socialites and the public—which is played up in the series.

And this is where Inventing Anna starts weaving in the girlboss narrative. TV Anna, played by Julia Garner, makes sweeping speeches about how women aren't taken seriously in business. Even as she sits in a prison cell, her reputation as an entrepreneur is more important to her than her freedom. One ancillary character describes the way Anna had to change her appearance—ditching the blonde for serious girl brunette, putting on glasses, wearing all-black power suits—to even be heard in the offices of some of the most powerful bankers and lawyers in New York, a strategy that somehow worked.

What Inventing Anna manages to portray so expertly is the iron grip that girlbossery had over the masses during the 2010s

This is one of the subtle manipulations happening in the show: it’s so easy to relate to this moment. Who among us hasn’t tweaked her appearance to some degree to be perceived a certain way in the workplace? These moments of relatability between Anna and the audience work as perfect distractors from the fact that she also took large sums of money from non-rich, non-white acquaintances who were left to pick up the pieces. The show even goes so far as to subtly place blame on these individuals by making it seem like they deserved what happened to them because they had benefited from their friendship with Anna. Instead of focusing on the nature of the crime, the focus is on transactional relationships—before you know it, you’re thinking about that one friend who is always out but never pays for anything. It’s truly a masterclass in don’t look over here, look over there! 

Inventing Anna’s affinity for Sorokin is put to its biggest test during the incident between Anna and Rachel Deloache Williams—a writer and friend of Anna who was allegedly scammed out of a large sum of money and eventually cooperated with the police to apprehend her—which functions as a sort of line in the sand in the series. You’re either on Rachel’s side or Anna’s side; there’s no room for middle ground. Rachel believed she was defrauded out of more than $60,000 on a trip to Morocco. Anna (and her attorney) painted Rachel as a weak social climber who was just mad that she had to pay for a lavish vacation that she had planned.

Now don’t get me wrong, in the Rachel episode, Anna’s behavior is deplorable and frightening. But as the series progresses, it tosses out tiny breadcrumbs in Anna’s defense and raises questions about Rachel’s responsibility in the Morocco ordeal. If Rachel could not afford her share of that suite, then why book it? Why did Rachel bring a work credit card on a personal vacation? What the fuck is up with that garden? Everyone is wrong, and no one is wrong. (Everyone is also a winner here: In real life, Williams turned a few pretty pennies for selling her story, and Anna Sorokin was found not guilty on that specific charge.)

KATIE LOWES AS RACHEL DELOACHE WILLIAMS (IMAGE VIA NETFLIX)

The series also makes abundantly clear that Anna could only achieve what she did because she was white and able to move in certain circles without anyone giving her a second glance. Her achievements are entirely rooted in her whiteness and ability to position herself close to powerful white men. This is one aspect of the storytelling that the show gets right. But her portrayal as a girlboss—an unyielding byproduct of feminism as corporate branding—is far too generous for someone who carried out a staggering amount of white-collar crimes in such a short amount of time. It’s an unearned framing that only worked because she was able to fool so many men and for that aspect alone, the series awards her a proverbial Yas Queen trophy. It’s also a stark contrast to the way creators are compelled to cover “bad” men like Bernie Madoff or all of the investor bros from The Big Short. Where is the philosophical exploration of their manhood being the biggest motivating factor for their actions?

On Thursday, March 3, another scorned girlboss will get the starlet treatment when Hulu releases its limited series on Elizabeth Holmes, The Dropout (there’s also a book and documentary about Holmes, if fiction doesn’t do it for you). It tells another story of another white woman who built another castle of sand, was praised as if she was the first woman in the history of women to accomplish anything, and watched it all come apart because she was selling her own pipe dream (and defrauding investors). I will absolutely watch it because I am a child of television, doomed to view whatever my overlords offer me. But underneath my own insatiable hunger for storytelling, I feel resistant to projects like The Dropout or Inventing Anna. It’s not that I’m against works that glorify crime—there are plenty of great movies about mobsters and murders (The Godfather is not one of them, come at me). Instead, it’s the implication that because these criminals are women, they are noteworthy in some way—or motivated by something greater, some higher calling from Lilith or Eve to commit crimes for the advancement of womankind. But sometimes, a crime is simply not that deep.

READER QUESTION WEDNESDAY!

Earlier this week, The Meteor held a briefing on the state of the caregiving crisis, which you can watch here. We’d love to hear from you on that issue. Tell us: Have you left your job in the past two years in order to care for a child or other family member? And if so, what would you have needed to be able to stay? Send your responses to [email protected], and we might feature your answer in next week’s newsletter.

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Hello Meteor readers—it perhaps goes without saying that it’s been a rough week in the world; as I write this, Russian troops have invaded Kyiv, and stories are pouring in about people fleeing Ukraine to Poland, having walked on foot for a full day. We’ve compiled a list of ways to help Ukrainians on our Instagram here.

In today’s newsletter, we’ve got four transgender writers reflecting on how Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s hateful decree—and the transphobic legislation being passed across the country—affects their lives. After that, read Shannon Melero’s interview with Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, editor of a new book called The Black Agenda: Bold Solutions for a Broken System, which elevates Black expertise in areas where it’s rarely sought.

There is some good news, thank goodness. President Biden has nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court; he kept his promise that he would nominate the first Black woman to SCOTUS, but what’s most exciting is that he’s nominated the most progressive judge among the candidates he was reportedly considering. (Lawyer and writer Dahlia Lithwick predicted her nomination in a recent edition of our newsletter.) More on that below.

Hold the line, everybody. And drop us one, too: [email protected].

—Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

WHY IS IT ALWAYS TEXAS

 Our Existence Is a Crime 

TEXANS PROTESTING PROPOSED BANS OF TRANS ATHLETES IN TEXAS, 2021 (PHOTO TAMIR KALIFA VIA GETTY IMAGES)

On Wednesday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a decree that essentially criminalizes trans kids and their parents, demanding that the Department of Family and Protective Services investigate parents who support and affirm their kids' gender identity as child abuse. Abbott also ordered doctors and teachers—and deputized individual citizens—to report trans children receiving life-affirming care. This draconian, hateful step was the most recent measure in a right-wing war on trans people in multiple states, which includes 125 anti-trans bills currently on the table, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

So what does the Texas news mean to the people most affected? The Meteor founding member Jennifer Finney Boylan asked four writers to answer that question here.

Brynn Tannehill
Trans activist and essayist 

With all that’s happening, I have only two emotional states: anger and despair. However, it’s not just the latest attack on trans people in Texas—that would criminalize our loving, tight-knit LGBT family—making me feel like this. It’s not just the courts full of Trump appointees looking to allow bathroom bans on trans people. It’s not just the impending demise of Obergefell and Lawrence after Roe falls that would make my marriage not just null and void, but illegal. It’s not just the fact that the next GOP administration will ban my friends from the military again. It’s not that SCOTUS will likely carve out a giant religious exemption to 45 years’ worth of local laws passed to protect LGBT people. It’s not just that Democrats think that preserving the filibuster is more important than preventing all this. And it’s not just Republicans admiring Putin because he has brutalized a nation’s worth of LGBT people into the closet.

It is ALL of this, taken together, that has demoralized the next generation of trans people, who should be looking to make the world better. Our trans son didn’t apply to a single university in the U.S. He’s at McGill in Canada instead, because he could no longer envision a future for himself in a country whose guiding principle is, “The cruelty is the point.” People like Abbott have deliberately and systematically destroyed any pathway to improving the lives of trans people.

We plan on joining him there in 2025.

Dawn Ennis
Award-winning writer and the first network TV news journalist in the US to come out as transgender

The stars at night may be big and bright, but—hold your clapping, please—Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has shown me that hate is all he has room for in his deep red Republican heart.

What Abbott and Texas attorney general Ken Paxton have done by equating gender-affirming healthcare with “child abuse” is send the message that only so-called “normal” children are welcome in the Lone Star State. That bigoted perspective excludes my transgender child.

Abbott not only ordered child welfare agents to “investigate” anyone who supports their gender-nonconforming and transgender children, but also called on “licensed professionals” and “members of the general public” to snitch on parents of trans kids, and turn them in, to state authorities, if they suspect gender-affirming medical care is being provided.

Texas is taking a page from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, from Hitler’s Nazi Germany, and perhaps also from the wild, wild west of the 19th century.

This week in 1836, defenders of the Alamo—who actually wanted to preserve their right to enslave laborers—wrote for help in their standoff with Mexican fighters. William B. Travis pleaded with “the people of Texas and all Americans in the world,” to come to their aid. “Victory or Death,” he wrote, would be the outcome.

We know how that ended. And I suspect I know how this will end: Victory at the ballot box for Texas Republicans, and death by suicide of untold transgender youth.

Let’s be clear: Expert researchers have identified the primary reason trans youth consider suicide is rejection, not because of their gender identity. In fact, if Gov. Abbott and others like him were to show acceptance, they could actually save lives!

If you or someone you know needs help, contact the Trans Lifeline at (877) 565-8860; The Trevor Project via chat, call, or text; or the LGBT Hotline at (888) 843-4564.

Gwen Smith
Columnist for the Bay Area Reporter, founder of the Transgender Day of Remembrance

With Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordering the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate trans youth—accusing supporting parents of being child abusers, and leaving them in fear of losing their own children to the state—people will die. This is not hyperbole.

When I was a child, I felt I could not come out. I felt like a monster, and felt alone, unable to utter what I knew was true: I was a trans girl. I considered suicide as a result.

In the many years since then, I have been pleased to see transgender kids gain acceptance and support—support that helps them make informed choices in their lives, under the care of their family and medical professionals.

I would love to think that his order comes from a place of ignorance. Yet I know better. This is not ignorance, but malevolence. This is pure cruelty, for cruelty’s sake.

What Abbott wants is for every trans person to experience that same pain I felt. No, it’s worse than that—he would be happy to see every transgender person in Texas simply drop dead.

Riley MacLeod
Trans writer and editor in Brooklyn 

Part of my old-in-trans-years psyche doesn’t totally believe the lives that are available to trans kids today: that often they can come out safely, that their parents and communities will support them, that doctors want to help them. Their experiences feel so different from mine that I can’t let my heart get too close to it all, because then I start thinking that I should have had a life like that too.

Sometimes I think trans kids and their supporters are naive to demand so much, but most times I’m awed by how brave they are to believe they deserve so much good. That they won’t accept the state not getting in line with the future they’re creating makes me feel bitter and small in comparison. They are, in so many ways, better than me, like all of our descendants are supposed to be.

What’s happening in Texas is deeply cruel, but trans people have always existed despite cruelty, and nothing a bunch of cis politicians do or say is going to change that. The kids are going to win, even if it’s really fucking hard. They’re going to grow into trans adults who think I’m as out of touch as I thought my elders were, and I’m so excited to find them as insufferable as my elders found me, and I’m so excited to love them for it.

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON 

• One more time for the people in the back: Ketanji Brown Jackson is official! She was confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2021, with bipartisan support that included Republican Senators Susan Collins, Lindsay Graham, and Lisa Murkowski. Judge Jackson, who is 51, graduated from Harvard Law, clerked for Justice Breyer (who she would be replacing), served as a federal defender and as the Vice Chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, among many other positions. On Twitter, Biden called her “one of our nation’s brightest legal minds.”

• The news was met with praise and celebration, including from Joy Ann Reid (“brilliant”), Rep. Cori Bush (“a career of standing up for those most in need”), Stacey Abrams (“a proud day for all Americans of good conscience”), Maya Wiley (“LET'S GO MAKE HISTORY!”), Bernice King (“our work continues, but this moment matters”), and Barack Obama.

• Relatedly: in 2016, Judge Jackson’s 11-year-old daughter Leila wrote a letter to President Obama recommending her mom as a replacement for Justice Scalia. “She’s determined, honest and never breaks a promise to anyone even if there are other things she’d rather do,” Leila wrote. “She can demonstrate commitment and is loyal and never brags. I think she would make a great Supreme Court justice.” I'm not crying, you’re crying. (Just kidding, I’m definitely crying.)
  

AND: 

• I don’t know if you’ve been following the Hollywood Unlocked/Queen is Dead saga, but this wild Buzzfeed post explains it all: basically, a tabloid news site erroneously reported that Queen Elizabeth had died, possibly because a source attending British Vogue editor Edward Enninful’s wedding misheard someone discussing the death of Mark Lanegan, a seminal grunge musician in the bands Screaming Trees and… Queens of the Stone Age. This is the kind of silly chaos I needed this week. RIP Mark.

• Niecy Nash and Jessica Betts are stunning on the first Essence cover to celebrate a same-sex couple.

• How Colombian Feminists Decriminalized Abortion: With Help From Their Neighbors

• NPR’s Weekend Edition has found a new host in Ayesha Rascoe, formerly their White House Correspondent. Congrats!

ASK BLACK EXPERTS

It Turns Out There Really Is a Black Agenda

And we all desperately need to get on board with it 

BY SHANNON MELERO

ANNA GIFTY (PHOTO BY KWAME ABRAH) 

“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 she compiles each explore 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, Doctor Marshall Shepherd writes, “Ultimately...the weather-climate gap will not disappear until racial wealth inequality disappears.”)

So: what's on the Black agenda? 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 sort of change in the academic or research community moving in the direction of 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 on 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.

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. 

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.

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.

MUST LISTEN

The Generational Impact of Misinformation

BY SHANNON MELERO

I rarely, if ever, ruminate on how being Puerto Rican might color my understanding of the news or how I even go about absorbing it. But on UNDISTRACTED, one of this week’s guests, Sara Lomax-Reese, said something that hit me like a lizard falling out of a tree in my grandma’s backyard. “We as Black people have been taken advantage of,” she starts. “I mean, we are so ripe for disinformation. That's the real challenge. There is incredible noise and…we are being inundated and saturated with stuff all the time. And you marry that with an education system that does not teach critical thinking, that does not equip [people] with the ability to say, ‘Wait a minute, the government is giving out crack pipes? That doesn’t sound right.’” (There was literally an article in the Washington Free Beacon that falsely claimed the Biden administration was handing out crack pipes to drug addicts. It went viral.)

I had to stop the episode right there because I was so dumbstruck by the idea that my family history—a long line of tobacco and sugar farmers who’ve been in Puerto Rico since the early 1800s as far as I know—could play a role in my inherent mistrust of the "mainstream" media. But it made total sense once I sat with the thought for a moment: after all, misinformation is exactly how the United States acquired Puerto Rico as a colony (yes I said colony, don’t @ me) in 1898 when America promised freedom from Spanish colonization and a different way of life. Misinformation is still causing chasms between island Puerto Ricans and diasporic Puerto Ricans.

When you really think about it, it’s an incredible racket and of course, I thought about it for far too long and fell into a pit of despair about the state of the world. But then, I pressed play again on the podcast and listened to the insight and wonderful work being done by Lomax-Reese and Akoto Ofori-Atta, both of whom created Black- and Brown-led news organizations, URL Media and Capital B respectively, to combat the “mainstream media” (you absolutely must listen to their dissection of the word mainstream).

Get into it here—sorry for any existential dread that ensues.

UNDISTRACTED IS SPONSORED BY:

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Hi, and welcome to our Wednesday edition. I’m still reeling from yesterday’s New York Times crossword (IT WAS A REBUS! BASED ON 2/22/22! Come ON) and freaked out by the fact that it’s 61 degrees in Brooklyn today. Empirically, I feel confident in saying that we are having a climate crisis.

In today’s newsletter, we’ve got Shannon Melero fulfilling one of her life’s goals: writing about (and celebrating!) the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team settling their long-running equal pay suit against U.S. Soccer. Believe her when she says she’s been following this case closely for six years like Nancy Drew with a magnifying glass. She’s cautiously optimistic, but also asks the important questions, like: when are all the other women’s sports teams going to get paid equally, too?

But first, the news! And if you’d like to email us about what’s on your mind, or just tell us what you’re up to today, we’d love to hear from you: [email protected]

—Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

WHAT'S GOING ON

• Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill is advancing in the state legislature. Though a Republican lawmaker withdrew an amendment that would have required teachers to actually out students to their parents, the bill still bans teachers from having sexual orientation or gender identity as part of their curriculum in grades K-3—in essence, an attack on LGBTQIA children and parents that would have far-reaching impact. (Fifteen other states have advanced similar “Don’t Say Gay” bills.) And in Iowa and Utah, laws that ban trans children—girls, specifically—from participating in sports have advanced, the most recent in a spate of ongoing anti-trans legislation. (Here's a good thread about why the trans and reproductive justice movements need to work together.) Finally, in one of the most extreme, alarming moves so far in the country, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has issued a decree directing Family and Protective Services to investigate trans children and instructing doctors and teachers to report the existence of trans children. This is what state-imposed child abuse looks like—an appalling step towards further criminalizing individual identity—and everyone should be afraid. If you’d like to donate to the Transgender Education Network of Texas, you can do that right here.

• After a massive cyberattack on government websites and banks in Ukraine, the U.S. has warned that Russia will likely launch a “full-scale invasion” within the next 48 hours. For a look at what this means to people on the ground, Al-Jazeera wrote about Ukraine’s “babushka battalion”—the older, nonmilitary women who are preparing to defend their country. And for some background on this complex situation, the documentary Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom is currently streaming on Netflix.

• Must-read of the week: Professor and New Yorker writer Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on the Black feminists who sought to remake the struggle for reproductive rights in the 1960s, in the face of both organizations that prioritized the needs of white middle-class women and a trend towards patriarchy among some Black men at the time. She lays plain the ways Black feminists centered the lives of poor women of color and illuminates how the idea of “choice”—whether or not a person can obtain an abortion—is nearsighted when reproductive rights also must include the ability to have a child and the means to support it.

  AND:

• Watch the trailer for Phoenix Rising, a new documentary about Evan Rachel Wood’s sexual abuse allegations against Marilyn Manson and how she changed the law for survivors in California.

• I’m loving this profile of the pop musician Raveena, whose music is described as aiming towards a “desi-futurist utopia.” Bumping “Rush”!

• Portland, Oregon, is getting a woman-focused sports bar called The Sports Bra. Founder Jenny Nguyen plans to air all women’s sports, all the time. All the beer and none of the bro energy!

• “Why We Love Lazy, Drunk, Broke Women On TV.” Click!

• This couple’s photos are challenging gender stereotypes of Asian women.

—JES

THE BEAUTIFUL GAME

The History of the U.S. Women’s National Team’s Fight for Equal Pay

I hope these women are drinking champagne out of a trophy this week

BY SHANNON MELERO

AN ASSEMBLY OF WINNERS (PHOTO BY BRUCE BENNETT VIA GETTY IMAGES)

I cried when the United States Women’s National Team (USWNT) won their fourth World Cup in 2019. They were tears of excitement, tears of joy, and tears of immense pride at seeing these women—some of whom I’d watched play on a college field in Piscataway, New Jersey, because their league team didn’t have a stadium—be recognized by hundreds of millions.

But they were also tears of anger. In the same year that the USWNT won that historic victory, they had, as a team, filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against the United States Soccer Federation (USSF) for unequal pay. Their claim argued that they were being paid less than the US Men’s National Team and were being given unequal resources—even though they had more World Cup wins than the men’s team, which to this day has won a total of *pulls out abacus* zero World Cups.

On Tuesday, the USSF and USWNT finally reached a settlement in the lawsuit—to the tune of $24 million. This is an enormous achievement for the team. But as with everything that has to do with labor and money, it’s a little more complicated than that.

For casual soccer fans, this case became news fodder on International Women’s Day 2019, when all 28 players on the USWNT filed that lawsuit. But this really all started in colonial America when the European settlers imposed their—just kidding! We don’t need to go back that far. (We could, but we won’t.) The struggle began in earnest in 1999 when the now-famous ’99ers won the Cup in a dramatic penalty kick-off against China. Don’t remember that match? I’ll bet you remember seeing a photo of Brandi Chastain, who scored the winning goal, kneeling on the grass, fists up in the air with nothing but her shorts and a sports bra. It’s the photo that launched a hundred sports bra campaigns.

THE ICON BRANDI CHASTAIN ON THE DAY SHE INVENTED THE CONCEPT OF ATHLEISURE AS FASHION (PHOTO BY RICH LIPSKI/THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES)

But it also marked a more critical turning point: Over 90,000 people showed up to the stadium for that game, and 40 million tuned in to ABC to watch from home. Women’s soccer—which at this point didn’t have an American professional league—was finally in the spotlight. The ’99ers capitalized on the moment to expose just how poorly America’s champions were being treated. They went on strike, refusing to appear in a scheduled tournament in Australia, to protest not just the pay gap between themselves and the men’s team but the complete lack of maternity leave. In an interview with a few of the ’99ers, the Washington Post described the USSF’s stance as “treating[ing] pregnancy as a “career-ending injury,” where players like gold medalist Kate Markgraf weren’t offered contract renewals because they’d given birth.

Thanks to public pressure, and the desire to ensure the top players showed up at the 2000 Olympics (where they won silver), the ’99ers were able to get maternity language introduced into USWNT contracts. (The policy wasn’t great, but at least women could no longer be cut from the team because they’d had a child.)

After 2000, women’s soccer struggled to translate into a profitable American league, and the pay discrepancy issue was silenced by the fact that the men’s league, Major League Soccer, was thriving. Out of sight, out of mind. And the National Team itself had its own internal strife over differing views on LGBTQ representation. This changed in 2012 when the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) was established, and talents like Ashlyn Harris, Christine Sinclair, Tobin Heath, and Alex Morgan brought back the excitement of soccer on a season to season basis.

Then, in 2016, Hope Solo, Megan Rapinoe, Alex Morgan, Carli Lloyd, and Becky Sauerbrunn filed a wage discrimination action with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Their charge: Unequal pay and treatment between the men’s and women’s national teams, and even though the USWNT was doing superior work, the movement they began was called Equal Play, Equal Pay. (Just in case you forgot, the men’s team had not won a World Cup by this point, while the women’s team had three World Cup wins and four Olympic golds.)

After that suit was filed, the team spent months carrying out their contractual obligations and negotiating a new contract behind the scenes—and according to a recent Instagram post from Hope Solo, the 2016 suit “still stands.” (It’s worth noting here that Solo does not see this settlement as a win, and is not entitled to the backpay included in the $22 million. She also does not believe the team will be able to successfully negotiate equal pay into their next contract.)

The men’s team had not won a World Cup, while the women’s team had three World Cup wins and four Olympic golds.

In 2017, the USWNT negotiated a new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) that addressed portions of the discrimination action. They were given increased per diems, better base salaries, and improved accommodation. It was a short-lived win. The women’s team had gotten a shred of parity, but it was in comparison to the old contract the men had. Once the men’s team got to the negotiation table with the USSF, there was another drastic change.

The men were offered an entirely different (and lucrative) pay-per-play bonus structure which still saw them making more money per match than the women. As The Guardian calculated in 2019, the women’s team earned a $37,500 bonus (per player, with rookies expecting slightly less) for qualifying for a World Cup. On the other hand, top players on the men’s team would have been paid over $108,000 if they managed to qualify. The numbers become more staggering from there once you factor in brand sponsorships, appearance fees for post-match events, and base salaries. The women had to perform twice as well to get close to the income of a men’s team that couldn’t win their way out of a pie-eating contest against a toothless infant. (Not you, Tim Howard, you’re okay.)

But now, six years, two medals, one documentary, and several hundred pages of legalese later—here we are.

ACCURATE SIGN IS ACCURATE. (PHOTO BY IRA L. BLACK VIA GETTY IMAGES)

I cried when I saw the news Tuesday morning, not because I was joyful and overwhelmed. But because I was so shocked to read it that I literally dropped my phone on my face during my morning Twitter scroll. Like every fan and sportswriter who has followed this story through its nonsensical twists and turns, I am optimistic, but cautiously so. The 28 players who filed suit will have to agree on how to split $22 million in back pay, while an additional $2 million will be placed in a fund to support their post-career ambitions and charities (each player can apply for up to $500,000 from the fund). That money is contingent on the ratification of a new CBA, but that’s a necessary formality; they’ll get their cash. “Once a new CBA has been ratified, the district court will be able to schedule the final approval of this settlement,” The Athletic's Meg Linehan reported.

But as any union member knows, the key to pay equity in the long term isn’t a one-time payout; it’s a solid contract that codifies equal pay as a basic standard, an outcome that Hope Solo does not believe is imminent. The plaintiffs in the 2019 case have said on numerous occasions that the fight is about more than just the back pay. It’s about ensuring the women who come after them will never have to go through all of this to get paid what they deserve.

On that score, things look promising–but I’m too much of a cynic to call it certain. The Federation is pledging that under the new contract (the current one expires in March), they’ll work with the Player’s Union to establish equal pay between the national teams, and there’s reason to believe they’ll hold true to this promise. Cindy Parlow Cone, the current USSF president, has already made enormous strides in good faith, most notably in December, when the USSF agreed to equal working conditions for the teams.

So yes, let’s all celebrate and anticipate a fair contract. But tomorrow, when the confetti is cleared and the hangover lifts, there are still equity battles to fight in the NWSL where Trinity Rodman signed a four year $1 million contract making her the highest-paid player in the league—which is $13 million less than what the 2021 MLS rookie of the year was given just to switch teams. Let’s also not forget the many fights still ahead at the WNBA, a league that has some of the best, most interesting athletes ever to touch a basketball but still gets asked to prove they deserve the financial and media investments the NBA takes for granted.

There is still so much to do in the landscape of women’s sports, but what the US Women’s National Team has shown everyone is that it’s possible. It’s not easy, fast, or simple, but it can be done. So to borrow a line from Megan Rapinoe: “Let’s fucking go.”

BEFORE YOU GO

Do you ever wonder why the US doesn’t provide paid parental leave when some of our global neighbors have already proven it’s possible? Why does it feel like there is a news item about child-care nightmares with parents and teachers clamoring for help every other week? Do you wish someone could give you concrete steps to address these issues without going absolutely nuts?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you’re a) human, and b) officially invited to join us Monday night for a special briefing. With America’s care economy in crisis, it’s time to talk about what’s next in the movement for child care, family leave, and sustainable wages for care providers.

Join us on February 28 to find out more. We’ll be joined by SuperMajority Executive Director Amanda Brown Lierman, Caring Across Generations chief of advocacy and campaigns Nicole Jorwic, Marshall Plan for Moms founder Reshma Saujani, and activist, writer, and filmmaker Paola Mendoza.

Thank you for being a friend. We'd love it if you threw a party and invited everyone you knew to read this newsletter. 

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Cheers to the BookTokers, book worms, book lovers, and even actual books–this newsletter is for you.

The subject of book banning is everywhere right now—but for school librarians, it’s more than just a talking point. So in today’s issue, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd spoke to the president of the American Association of School Librarians, Jennisen Lucas, about what it’s like to be on the front lines of this “life-or-death” issue.

We’ve also got Suzan Skaar, a rad librarian from Wyoming, with a personal account of what happened after members of the organization Moms for Liberty challenged books in her Cheyenne school district. “The whole country is divided,” she says, “and Wyoming is no exception.”

Before we dive into all that, a small favor. We’re new here, and we’d love it if you sent this email to a friend, or three! Or pop it in the group chat. Consider it your good deed of the day.

Call us, beep us, if you wanna reach us at [email protected].

—Shannon Melero

WHAT'S GOING ON

• Former police officer Kim Potter has been sentenced to two years in prison for the 2021 shooting death of Daunte Wright in Minneapolis. Potter was convicted of first and second-degree manslaughter in December after claiming that she had meant to reach for her Taser during her interaction with Wright, whom she’d pulled over for having expired tags and an air freshener dangling from his rearview mirror. Potter “never once said his name,” said Wright’s mother, Katie Wright, before the sentencing. “And for that, I’ll never be able to forgive you. And I’ll never be able to forgive you for what you’ve stolen from us.”

• On Thursday, the Center on Poverty and Social Policy reported that 3.7 million children are now living below the poverty line as a result of the Child Tax Credit Payments expiring in January of this year. The Biden administration implemented the tax credit to help parents during the pandemic (which hasn’t ended, Joseph!). Unsurprisingly, Black and Latinx children and their parents are the most impacted by the loss of the tax credit program.

AND:

• Two transgender swimmers, Lia Thomas and Iszac Henig, won their respective races at the Ivy championships. May their DMs be filled with nothing but gold medal emojis.

• Millennials will be remembered for buying too much avocado toast. But Gen Z’s legacy will be claiming their LGBTQIA identity without fear. They probably still won’t be able to buy a house, though.

• LeVar Burton wants us to read banned books, so guess what we’re doing.

• Kim and Kanye have been unavoidable this last week, and while there are a lot of layers to that particular bean dip, one thing must be said: abuse takes many forms. Using social media to target, harass, and belittle the mother of one’s children is one of them.

—SM

LIBRARIANS AT WORK

What Are Book Bans Doing to Kids? 

“It leads to ‘I’m all alone’ kind of thinking”

BY JULIANNE ESCOBEDO SHEPHERD

SOME CLASSIC READS ARE BEING CHALLENGED BY MOMS FOR LIBERTY, A GROUP BENT ON LIMITING THE LIBERTIES OF KIDS WHO JUST WANT TO READ. (PHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

The image above depicts just a few of the books that have been banned or challenged over the last few years, though today, some are considered cornerstones of American literature. And now in  2022, the censors are back at it, with legislators, school officials, and parents across the country engaged in a new, frenzied effort to ban certain book titles from school libraries.

These ban attempts often cite “pornographic material” as their concern, but in reality, work to suppress certain points of view: The book Gender Queer, for instance, an illustrated memoir by nonbinary author Maia Kobabe, has been especially targeted in the last year, as have books like Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give, which deals with police brutality, and George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue, about growing up queer and Black. And last month, a Tennessee school board banned Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a canonical graphic novel about the Holocaust, citing cursing and the apparently objectionable nudity of cartoon mice.

Many of these challenges have been spearheaded by members of Moms for Liberty, a conservative organization championing “parental rights.” (There is, hearteningly, a counterinsurgency of suburban moms called Book Ban Busters.) And while bans have been most successful in conservative states like Florida and Texas, books have also been challenged in nearly every state in the country, turning typically sleepy school board meetings into hotbeds of right-wing grievance.

I spoke with Jennisen Lucas, president of the American Association of School Librarians, an organization on the front lines.

Book bans and challenges are happening across the country. What are your broad, bird’s-eye-view thoughts about what’s been going on? 

Jennisen Lucas: This is, to me, extremely concerning [because] it’s so widespread and so large. At the American Library Association (ALA) and the Association of School Librarians, we’re trying to figure out, “How do we work with this at this huge large scale?” We definitely stand against censorship; we stand for intellectual freedom and the idea that students have the right to decide what they’re reading. [But conservatives] have branded ALA as being a very liberal organization and not somebody that you want to listen to. So how do we motivate people to say that there are definitely a lot of people out there who don’t think that we should be banning books?

We tend to go with the idea that parents should be talking to their children about what they’re reading and not whole-scale trying to remove things from them. And then the fact that [the bans are] very specifically targeted: they’re targeting LGBTQ, they are targeting race. So it’s a challenge to erase those voices. And that’s not something that is really good for our constitutional republic.

Most of this seems to come from Moms for Liberty, which consists of parents and seems extremely well-funded.

It’s definitely a very well-funded and well-organized movement. But they are approaching this as, let’s get people riled up so that they go and talk to their school boards themselves. [The ALA says], Well, you do have rights for your kid, and when a parent comes to a librarian and says, “Hey, I’m concerned that my child should not be reading this,” we back the parent up. That’s their prerogative as a parent.

The issue gets much bigger when it’s like, “No. I need that removed because I don’t think any kids should have access to that.” And we’re also being hit with a lot of varying definitions because people are coming in with, “Oh, that’s pornographic.” For most of them, this is normal teenage activity and has been for generations.

We definitely stand against censorship; we stand for intellectual freedom and the idea that students have the right to decide what they’re reading.

When you think about the books that have been banned—books like Gender Queer or The Hate U Give—it seems like they’re not just targeting whatever they think might be salacious material. They’re targeting specific identities in children. 

What we’re seeing as a national trend is a conflation between “pornography” and LGBTQIA+. Even if there is not any sex at all in the book, [book banners are] still claiming pornography because that’s not what they approve of as a society. Part of [our] concern is that the conversation itself is harmful to our students that identify in any of those categories; that when they’re hearing people say, “Hey, this is pornographic, and this is not acceptable, and this is just disgusting”—and these are some of the words that are coming from parents—that is not good for the mental health of our students.

Each of our students needs to be able to see themselves in books and have that representation. It’s extremely important, and personally, to me, this is a life-or-death situation for some of our kids. If they are completely turned off from and denied access to materials like that, it leads to “I’m all alone” kind of thinking, which is a precursor to severe depression and suicidal thoughts.

I wanted to ask you about that—I feel like we’re having this national conversation about politics, but the actual students and how they feel are getting lost. 

I have talked to my students about this, and it’s interesting to watch them get heated up about it. Especially our high school kids, who are preparing for adulthood and are in that situation where today I’m 17 and a minor and tomorrow’s my birthday. You’re at that cusp of legally being able to do all of this stuff on your own. They almost feel micromanaged.

But the number of students around the country who are forming banned book clubs who are standing up and speaking at school board meetings—it’s all [types of students, even if they don’t identify as LGBTQ or BIPOC]. Books with LGBTQ content, books talking about race, and the history of race are for all kids. Everybody needs to be able to see that perspective.

CHEYENNE, WYOMING

Report from a Red State Librarian

A CONVERSATION WITH SUZAN SKAAR, BY JULIANNE ESCOBEDO SHEPHERD

LET THE TEENS READ! (PHOTO BY JOHN KEEBLE VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

So how does it feel to be a librarian in one of the schools Jennisen Lucas describes? Suzan Skaar, a librarian at South High School in Cheyenne, Wyoming, knows. 

Last December, books by two authors—Tiffany D. Jackson and Ellen Hopkins—were challenged in Cheyenne by local members of Moms for Liberty. Though the upset seems to have died down now, it alarmed members of the school district, including teachers and librarians. Skaar talked to us about what it was like to be a school librarian at the center of one of these challenges. 

The whole country is divided, and Wyoming is no exception.

Right now, there are seven certified secondary librarians in Cheyenne—we’re a pretty tight group. [Before the local book challenges], we worked with our new superintendent, and we prepared some information to put on the district homepage about book selection and how you can challenge books, that kind of thing. We’re lucky enough to have a really good board policy around selection and collection development. So we kind of met it head-on, in a very subtle way.

What they were specifically challenging was Ellen Hopkins; she writes about issues kids are influenced by or have to deal with in their lives. [Hopkins’ YA novel Traffick focuses on the lives of five teens who escaped sex trafficking.] And, and so for some reason, they picked on her—well, she’s always picked on, she’s probably one of the most likely authors to be challenged. Then they picked up on Tiffany D. Jackson, and I spent Christmas break reading all of her novels. She’s a Black American author who writes about social issues that are really close to more urban-area Black teens, but they’re things that my kids identify with. [They’re so popular that] I can’t keep them on the shelf; I had to actually go read the books from the state app because all of my books were checked out over Christmas.

My [own] kids are gonna read what I want them to read, but you can’t influence what my kids read—we all get to do that for ourselves.

[After the initial objections at the December board meeting], our superintendent asked us, “So how many of you have had a request for the form to start a challenge process?” And not one of us had received an official challenge from the community. That just makes you wonder: it’s a national trend, but is it just a lot of yelling, or is it really a concern?

I don’t believe that in a democracy, this should even be an issue. In Wyoming, we’re a little bit of “live and let live,” you know. “My kids are gonna read what I want them to read, but you can’t influence what my kids read—we all get to do that for ourselves.”

I want to tell you something that happened this morning. We had a pep assembly, and we had a bunch of kids that didn’t want to go, so I let them come in here. And one little girl was looking around, and I said, “Can I help you find something?” and she said she wanted to look for a specific mental health disorder. So we went to the catalog, and I showed her how to look for it… and took her to the section. And her eyes strayed from the Mental Health section and went straight to LGBTQ Nonfiction. She said, “Oh my god, do you have this book? Can you have this book in this state?” And I said, “Well, so far, we do. I purchased [it] for our students because there’s a high interest in that topic and a lot of questions.” And she grabbed it—I don’t know if you’ve heard of the book, This Book Is Gay—and she goes, “Forget about the mental health. I’m checking out this one.”

I have trust and hope in the generation coming up. They’re more savvy about how to deal with all the information that’s thrown at them.

WE'VE GOT A QUESTION FOR YOU

Did you read in school? Of course you did! What's a book you remember reading that might be banned now and what did you get out of reading it? Tell us at [email protected], and we'll feature a few of your responses in a future newsletter.

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Hello and happy Give Zendaya an Emmy week!

In today’s newsletter, a very personal take on race, adoption, and what it means to be let down by those you love. Rebecca Carroll contemplates the year she’s had since first publishing her memoir, Surviving the White Gaze, including the ways her parents reacted to it. If you know any of Rebecca’s work, I don’t need to tell you how moving this essay is; it feels like receiving a gift to be let so intimately into her world. And if you’d like to hear more from Rebecca after reading, she’ll be in conversation with the author Ijeoma Oluo (So You Want to Talk About Race) on Twitter Spaces today, February 16, at 6 p.m. EST. Join them here.

But first, the news. And as always, if you have questions, comments, or want to tell us how we’re doing, hit us up at [email protected].

—Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

WHAT'S GOING ON

• This week we learned that the San Francisco Police Department charged a woman with a property crime based on DNA they collected from her rape kit. Yes: the SFPD has been USING RAPE KIT DNA to charge RAPE VICTIMS with CRIMES. District Attorney Chesa Boudin dismissed the charges but found that this simply appalling practice has in fact been routine—which is even more grotesque when you know how infrequently rape kits are actually tested to identify rapists (their presumable reason for being). So... why are survivors expected to trust the cops again?

• Prince Andrew got to pay his way out of testifying in his Epstein-enabled sexual abuse lawsuit. Virginia Giuffre, who accused him of raping her when she was a teenager, will donate the hopefully enormous amount of settlement money to a victims’ rights charity of her choice, and Prince Andrew will get to retain the title of “Lord Shithead.”

• Jade Kearney talked about creating She Matters, an app to help Black women experiencing postpartum depression. “I’ve cried more behind closed doors in the last 12 weeks than I have in my entire life, but I refuse to give up because Black women are suffering and the problem is fixable,” she told TechCrunch.

AND:

• Doctors have cured a woman of HIV using a stem-cell transplant from an umbilical cord. She’s the first woman and third person ever to be considered cured of HIV—a scientific breakthrough and the kind of positive news we can use.

• A new study shows that climate change-related disaster relief is not set up to include LGBTQ+ people, which has led people like trans farmworker Paloma Reyes to create her own support system when disasters strike. The professors who conducted the study have outlined policy changes to ensure that climate change-related disaster relief is accessible for queer and trans people when they need it.

• I will watch anything with Keke Palmer in it, but especially if it’s Jordan Peele’s new horror movie Nope, in which she seems to play a Hollywood horse trainer haunted by—possessed weather? The trailer looks typically scary, but details are scant. Until we know more, I’ll just be bumping Palmer’s teenage banger “Bottoms Up.”

—JES

ON RACE AND FAMILY

Still Surviving the White Gaze

What happened after my memoir

BY REBECCA CARROLL

REBECCA CARROLL AND HER FATHER, 1974. (PHOTO COURTESY OF REBECCA CARROLL)

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.

REBECCA CARROLL, 1973. (PHOTO COURTESY OF REBECCA CARROLL)

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 created a microcosm with him, the infallible genius and hopeless romantic, 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?

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

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.

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.

THE AUTHOR AND HER CHILD. (PHOTO COURTESY OF REBECCA CARROLL)

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.

BEFORE YOU GO

Don't forget to reserve the best seat on your couch for a Twitter Spaces conversation with Rebecca Carroll and Ijeoma Oluo happening today, February 16th, at 6 p.m. EST! We'll be waiting for you right here.

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This week, it was reported that the Taliban is currently detaining at least nine foreigners in Afghanistan, including two UK journalists who were in Kabul to report for the UN. But we’ve long known about the Taliban’s hostilities toward journalists, especially women journalists—and of course toward women in general.

That’s why today’s newsletter feels so urgent.

First, Mariane Pearl sits down with the incredible Afghan women behind Rukhshana Media, a news organization that reports on women in Afghanistan and the Taliban government from the ground, at great personal risk. After that, Shannon Melero writes about France’s shameful new ban on hijab in sport and her own experiences as a hijabi athlete. In a week of headlines questioning whether foreign policy can truly be feminist, this edition will convince you that it’s more important than ever.

As ever, if you’ve got thoughts—on what you’re reading, or what you’d like to read—we’re all ears: [email protected].

—Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

THE COST OF AN UNTOLD STORY

Six Months of the Taliban

What life is like for women in Afghanistan now—from two journalists fighting to get their stories out

BY MARIANE PEARL

A WOMAN AND HER CHILD ON THE ROAD IN KABUL, JANUARY 2022. (PHOTO BY SCOTT PETERSON VIA GETTY IMAGES)

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 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? 

Zahra Joya: For nine years, prior to creating Rukhshana, I sat in newsrooms, most often the only female to be seen, and saw how much women and girls’ lives were ignored by the media. We had no space, no opportunities to show our worth. Men genuinely believed we couldn’t do the job. So, I founded Rukhshana in 2020 with my own savings to tell our stories, drive change and foster a national dialogue about and with all women in Afghanistan, regardless of ethnicity or religious beliefs. Rukhshana herself was a 19-year-old girl from central Afghanistan who, in 2015, tried to flee an arranged marriage to be with the boy she loved. The Taliban accused her of adultery, dug a hole in the ground, leaving her upper body out, and stoned her to death. I chose her name so that each time we pronounce it we honor her—and fight against the risk of oblivion.

Zahra Nader: My biggest fear is that young women who are taught history in the future will say, “I can’t believe there were once female journalists in our country.”

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 1996 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.

RUKHSHANA CO-FOUNDER ZAHRA JOYA. (PHOTO COURTESY OF ZAHRA JOYA)

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.

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON 

• Congress has passed the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act, a bill some have nicknamed the “#MeToo Bill,” which will allow people who experience sexual misconduct in the workplace to take their claims to court and speak about their experiences publicly, rather than having to submit to arbitration in private and other binding employment contracts which served only to silence survivors and protect businesses. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who co-sponsored the bill with Sen. Lindsey Graham (!?!), called it “one of the biggest workplace reforms in history.”

• The situation in Ukraine is rapidly evolving; on Friday, the Biden Administration warned Americans to leave within 24 to 48 hours and that Russia could launch an invasion “during the Olympics.” 

AND:

• Hailey Kaas, a writer in São Paolo, is working on “a series of essays to explore what it is to be travesti (a transfeminine category specific to Latin America).” I learned a lot from the first essay about Big Brother Brasil contestant Linn da Quebrada and how travesti identity is inextricable from race, class, and the colonization of Brazil.

• Instead of watching the Super Bowl, consider listening to this week’s UNDISTRACTED podcast, in which Brittany Packnett Cunningham speaks with sports journalists Jemele Hill and Cari Champion about the pervasive culture of racism in the NFL. (Plus no bad commercials!)

• I’m loving the love in this edition of the LA Times’s Latinx Files newsletter, in which readers wrote in with song dedications to their valentines. My favorite note: “Let’s go get tacos!” #TacosBeforeVatos

• Here’s a fun song by the Petrol Girls called “Baby, I Had an Abortion.”

—JES

HATERS GONNA HATE

Liberté, Egalité, Islamophobie

The French government makes another move in its battle against hijab

BY SHANNON MELERO

FRENCH WOMEN'S SOCCER TEAM, LES HIJABEUSES, PROTESTING THE HIJAB BAN AT JARDIN DU LUXEMBOURG (SCREEN GRAB VIA LE PARISIEN)

“How are you going to do all of that with that,” a doctor once asked me during a visit. The that she was referring to was my hijab, and the all of that was a Spartan race I was participating in that fall. In my short life as a hijabi, it was the first time I had considered whether my choice would hinder my athletic pursuits. I shrugged and said, “I think they have sports hijabs online.” It seemed like a simple enough solution, and my appointment carried on as usual, with my doctor telling me to bring my medal to our next visit.

As I soon discovered, the intersection of hijab and activewear was a hotbed of debate—not just from consumers who found fault in nearly every product but from entire governments who sought to legislate against hijab in sport, all in the name of women’s liberation. It turned out that it wouldn’t be my hijab hindering me, but global ignorance, manifesting itself in an obsession with a small piece of fabric that some women choose to place or not place over their hair.

That ignorance has steadily grown since my days of obstacle course racing. Just three weeks ago, the French government voted to ban hijab wearing in sports competitions to assert “neutrality” on the field. Technically, “all conspicuous religious symbols” like yarmulkes or turbans would fall under this ban, but given France’s history of hostility toward Muslims, the rule was clearly targeted. Just last year, the government limited the religious freedoms of over 5 million Muslim and immigrant citizens by placing strict regulations on homeschooling, the finances of religious organizations, and strengthening France’s “neutrality principle,” which “prohibits civil servants from wearing religious symbols like the Muslim hijab and voicing political views.”

THE AUTHOR, IN HER PRIME, TWO SECONDS BEFORE SHE FELL INTO A MUD PUDDLE. (IMAGE COURTESY OF SHANNON MELERO)

This latest affront to hijab in sport is particularly unsettling considering the political climate of the Olympics. This year, an Uyghur athlete, Dinigeer Yilamujiang, lit the Olympic flame in Beijing, despite the Chinese government being accused of carrying out human rights violations against the Uyghur Muslim population, equivalent to “a campaign of genocide.”

The 2024 Summer Olympics, to be held in Paris, will have its own issues, as sporting authorities decide how the country’s ban will affect international competitors. But even without an Olympics looming, the ban is symptomatic of the lingering mistrust of Islam in predominantly Judeo-Christian nations that believe themselves too superior to fall into the trap of theocracy.

It’s all infuriating. The choice to do anything in hijab–go to work, play a sport, draw breath–opens the wearer up to an endless stream of vitriol. Hardened athletes like English boxer Safiyyah Syeed and Olympic bronze medalist Ibtihaj Muhammad manage to soldier on with fearlessness and hijabs that don’t slip. (How!?) But when I think of these laws, I think of the millions of women who will have to consider leaving their club or school teams—women who just want to play the game.

I never bought that sport hijab. Partly for personal reasons pertaining to where I was with my faith at the time and because I was experiencing some hearing loss. The sport hijabs available at the time would have covered my ears, making it harder to be aware of any fellow racers trying to pass me on uneven terrain. I finished that Spartan race in what my friends jokingly called hijab-lite–everything covered but my hair. By the end of it, I felt like I had climbed a mountain (I had) and didn’t give a second thought to what wasn’t on my head. As for the hijabis I met up with later in the week, they didn’t care either; they wanted to see the medal.

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