Three Questions About Resilience
  May 28, 2024 Hello Meteor Readers! Julianne Escobedo Shepherd here; I’m on newsletter duty this summer, filling in for the genius Samhita Mukhopadhyay while she promotes her genius book. When I tell you that I’m thrilled to be here, please let’s keep it real: I am legit psyched. And I will try not to curse a bunch. In today’s newsletter, we debut a new column: Three Questions About _____, a quick interview about a topic of great interest to us. This week, Rebecca Carroll speaks to Soraya Chemaly about her latest book, The Resilience Myth, and the ways that the idea of resilience—staying strong, bouncing back, keeping on, etc.—may both help and harm us. Plus, the women journalists of Gaza and the climate impact of binge-viewing. I missed you though, Julianne  WHAT’S GOING ONSupreme micromanagers of the United States: Though it was overshadowed by a deluge of news, on Thursday the conservative Supreme Court majority ruled that South Carolina could continue using its gerrymandered map—which is to say, a racist voting map that the NAACP charges discriminates against more 30,000 Black voters. In Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent, cosigned by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, she accused her peers of “micromanaging” and also noted that they’re acting like they don’t even know what the hell they’re doing. “The majority picks and chooses evidence to its liking; ignores or minimizes less convenient proof; disdains the panel’s judgments about witness credibility; and makes a series of mistakes about expert opinions,” she wrote. “On page after page, the majority’s opinion betrays its distance from, and lack of familiarity with, the events and evidence central to this case.” Justice Kagan also noted the real danger of the decision—that it’s a big fat present to state legislators and mapmakers who “might want to straight-up suppress the electoral influence of minority voters… Go right ahead, this Court says to States today.” AND:
 THREE QUESTIONS ABOUT…Resisting the Resilience TrapAuthor Soraya Chemaly dispels the myth of bottomless grit. BY REBECCA CARROLL VIA INSTAGRAM Most of us hear the word “resilience” and immediately think: individual strength and the ability to survive pretty much anything, at all cost—and like that’s a real flex. It is, and it isn’t, argues Soraya Chemaly in her new book, The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth after Trauma. As someone who considers myself resilient AF, I was eager to sit down with Chemaly to talk about the ways in which we misconstrue its meaning, how it privileges white women, and what it’s doing to our bodies. Rebecca Carroll: What is the biggest misconception about resilience? Soraya Chemaly: The biggest misconception is that resilience is a thing that we contain inside of us—as this extreme version of hyper-individualism, in that we’re supposed to think of it as a trait [we have], or a skill we can learn. All of that is a relatively small portion of what resilience really is. Because in order for us to act in those ways of being self-sufficient and personally strong, we’ve had some level of care, love, and support from someone who gave us a sense of possibility for ourselves in life. The connection between resilience and hyper-individualism is interesting, especially to me as a Black woman, because Black women are almost always expected to be strong and resilient without any kind of a net. Whereas white women have this entire infrastructure that supports and emboldens their fragility, often considered to be a kind of resilience itself. Can you speak to that? The way I try to describe it in the book is that for women, but particularly for Black women, their role is to be resilience resources for other people. They don’t actually get the right, the dignity, or the care that is expected from them. Structurally speaking, white women’s fragility requires the flexibility and the shock-absorbing factor from the Black women around them. The mandate of resilience as a societal goal, or even as a personal goal, is often constructed in a way that makes its toll on others invisible. Because if the way you cope and you adapt is positive, but everyone else around you is suffering and exhausted, maybe you’re just an entitled asshole. Let’s at least get our words straight here and say what it is we mean. Because the mandate of resilience as a goal, as a societal goal, or even as a personal goal, is often constructed in a way that makes its toll on others invisible. How can we reenvision the idea of resilience in healthier ways moving forward? The idea of resilience that we hold in such high esteem is actually brutalizing to people’s bodies. [It usually] has to do with growth mentality, optimism, and mental toughness. But if you think about the word mental toughness, its inversion is physical frailty. Mental toughness denigrates dependence, need, physical want, and material poverty. And if you think that people can power their way through anything with their mind, then you’re much less likely to be investing in the social structures and institutions that sustain people at just the bare minimum. If, for example, instead of self-sufficiency, we saw vulnerability as a strength to us all, because we take care of each other, we would have a different vision of what it means to be resilient. If what we want out of resilience is the ability to cope with crisis or to adapt to adversity in a positive way, resilience is not the word we should be using.  Rebecca Carroll is a writer, cultural critic, and podcast creator/host. Her writing has been published widely, and she is the author of several books, including her recent memoir, Surviving the White Gaze. Rebecca is Editor at Large for The Meteor.  FOLLOW THE METEOR    Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend?
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