Althouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Michelle Obama had that beautiful line, ‘When they go low, we go high,'” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) told a Los Angeles Times columnist in March 2017. “I thought about it a lot. But I also thought, ‘We lost the election.’ My view now is that when they go low, we fight back.”...

In a December 2016 HuffPost column, [transgender rights advocate Dana Beyer]... “Now, when they go low (and they do so every day), we must go lower. We fight them with everything we’ve got. Americans love a fighter, so let’s give them a fight.”

Last June, Neera Tanden, the Hillary Clinton apostle and head of the Center for American Progress, used colorful language on Twitter to argue that, when the other side goes low, “going high doesn’t . . . work.”...

“When they go low, I say, we hit harder,” [said Michael Avenatti, last August]...

Speaking in February on the “Lovett or Leave It” podcast, hosted by former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett, author and commentator Roxane Gay declared.... “When they go low, we need to go [f—–g] subterranean.... Until Democratic politicians start adopting that, we’re never, ever going to overcome these kinds of obstacles.”...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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