#Erin Aubry Kaplan

[loudlylovingreview]

ERIN AUBRY KAPLAN: CAN WOMEN WIN?

It will take concerted action to ensure that women belong in the House. In 2018, in the first midterm elections after Donald Trump won the presidency, the United States experienced a surge in women running for and winning elected office. It wasn’t a fluke. The phenomenon continued with the 2020 and 2022 election cycles, and today the number of women in Congress is at an all-time high—29% of the…

[arcticdementor]

Whenever people ask me why I keep subscribing to The New York Times, even though I believe it despises people like me and is working in many ways to make our lives worse, I tell them that one has to know how one’s enemies are thinking. The Times is the parish newsletter of the Cathedral, and as such the thoughts expressed there, whether openly in op-ed pieces or implicitly in its news coverage, pretty much express the views of the American ruling class — or at the very least opinions the ruling class believes are normative. Attention must be paid, because these opinions will sooner or later affect your life.

One of the most interesting aspects of Times-reading is coming across outrageous remarks that indicate how deeply inside the progressive bubble the newspaper is. I say “progressive,” because the Times is no longer a liberal newspaper. No authentically liberal newspaper would publish something like this lunatic racist screed.

…

For a long time, conservatives used to think that by pointing out liberal hypocrisies, we would compel liberals to change. Now, nobody on the Right can possibly have that illusion. The people in power today in our country — not just in political power, but in power within all the important institutions of American life — have absorbed this postliberal Leftist viewpoint, and think of it as normal — just as the ruling class of the 1950s American South did when racism benefited whites who wanted to control their own neighborhoods. If it was wrong then — and I believe it was — then it’s wrong today.

Let me put in a word for Erin Aubry Kaplan, though. Wanting to live around people who look and think like you, and share your culture, is very human. About 15 years ago, the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam (the Bowling Alone guy) published results of a study he was doing on how diversity affected social capital. What did he discover?

…

It’s not just about race. You might be a nice middle-class liberal pleased to be living in an ethnically diverse neighborhood. But let’s say a white redneck family moves into a rental house on your block. Let’s say that all their cars — old, beat-up vehicles — have Trump stickers on them. The pick-up even has a Confederate flag sticker in the back windshield. They put a Trump 2020 sign in their yard during the campaign. They play music a little bit too loud, and sometimes they argue with each other in the driveway, cursing and carrying on. You get the picture. How are you going to feel about their presence? Chances are it’s going to wind you up, because these people don’t fit in — and it’s 100 percent about class and culture. You would prefer to have a nice middle-class liberal family living there, the kind of people who mind their manners, and put in their lawn signs that say BLACK LIVES MATTER and “IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE…”. Progressivism gives you a conceptual vocabulary with which to justify your antagonism to the redneck neighbors. They make you feel “unsafe” in your own neighborhood, with their Trumpy redneckery, and so forth.

It’s bigotry based not on race, but on class. But bigotry it is. You are, like Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer, a bigot, but a bigot for the Left. That’s the kind of bigotry that is acceptable to the ruling class in American life. You can get an op-ed in The New York Times with that bigotry. White people who express the same kind of sentiment risk having their reputations destroyed by the attacks of the kind of power-holders who cheer for the Erin Aubry Kaplans of the world, but who at the same time see white people who reason in the same exact way about their neighborhoods as the scum of the earth who deserve whatever they get.

Imagine that you are that white couple whose interest in her My Little Library so triggered Erin Aubry Kaplan. You are thought by her to be racist for trying to “gentrify” her black neighborhood. But if Erin Aubry Kaplan overheard you talking about how you preferred to live in an all-white neighborhood, she would call you racist too. You can’t win. Progressives like Erin Aubry Kaplan and the people at The New York Times who publish her have no interest in logical consistency or moral fairness. Progressive racism is just social justice, haven’t you heard?

…

What Kaplan — and The New York Times — supports is a double standard that dispossesses white people in the same way that a previous generation of laws and standards dispossessed people of color. And they want us all to call this progress.

You can roll your eyes at the hypocrisy of Erin Aubry Kaplan and The New York Times, but you had better be well aware that this hypocrisy is not seen as hypocritical at all by the ruling class and the Cathedral. In the spaces they control — like university campuses — they execute such racist policies all the time, such as creating racially exclusive student housing, while denying (as they should) whites the opportunity to live in such places. I believe that if progressives (of all races) had their way, they would expand these racist policies, and write protecting them into law. This is why it is important to read The New York Times: to know what the elites who control this society think, and what they are likely to do with their power.

One of the most interesting things about progressives is that they honestly cannot conceive of people objecting in good faith to what they proclaim. If you are a white person working at The New York Times, you probably never encounter white people who object to this kind of progressive racism, or find it problematic in any way. Those that do — like the liberal journalist Donald McNeil — have been driven out. Whites who work in environments under progressive cultural control (such as major corporations) have learned to keep their objections to themselves if they want to keep their jobs.

[the-end-of-art]

Became part of our personal coherence

Mourning My White Husband in the Age of Trump  by Erin Aubry Kaplan in the New York Times

When I married in 2000, I changed my name. I expanded it — kept my name but added my husband’s name, Kaplan, without a hyphen. I wanted my name to reflect a conjoining that was also an evolution, literally one thing following another. This was an experiment, as all marriages are, that felt exciting and open-ended, not least because I’m black and my husband was white.

I wasn’t excited because I thought we’d be some kind of symbol of racial resolution. I was hardly that naïve, and neither was Alan. I am a journalist who had been covering black matters for years at that point, and Alan was a locally famous high school teacher of American history who believed that race and racism had shaped America far more than it was willing to admit. Not surprisingly, he didn’t think changing my name was a great idea. “Black people know you as Erin Aubry,” he said bluntly. “They’ll resent a name so obviously white and Jewish. It’ll get in your way.”

He wasn’t being snide or heroic. One of the many things he’d figured out is that white people showing up in a black space, including the intimate space of a relationship, is seen by many black folks as an incursion, even if they don’t say so. That he understood and was even sympathetic to this view impressed me, but I changed my name anyway. It felt romantic.

We were married nearly 15 years. In the summer of 2015, Alan died unexpectedly from complications following a routine surgery. He was only 60. A little more than a year after that, Donald Trump was elected president. Since then I have wrestled with two kinds of grief: losing Alan and losing the singular honesty and clarity he brought to the issue of race not just as my husband but as a white man in America. The griefs are related, one compounding the other.

In this new age of racial retrenchment, without the incisiveness Alan brought to our discussions of whiteness and its vastly underestimated impact on the national psyche, I feel more alone than at any other time in my life. Throughout our relationship, we shared a political lens and a common language around the import and meaning of race that was a big part of our intimacy, and part of my certainty that however estranged I might feel from the larger white world, I always had someone at home to talk to.

And talk freely: I never had to explain or defend my racial frustrations, anxiety or even paranoia. That isn’t to say Alan agreed with me all the time. We routinely questioned each other’s orthodoxies about white and black. Sparks flew because the stakes were high on both sides, personally and professionally.

Alan’s anger about racial inequality was rooted in his work, but it wasn’t something he left in the classroom — and I loved that about him. Ever the teacher, sometimes he’d challenge me to justify my feelings with evidence; other times he’d cite a book or article he’d read recently — by Chris Hedges, Naomi Wolf, Chalmers Johnson — that put my feelings into a bigger, more complicated context than I sometimes wanted to consider.

“I’m not one of your students,” I’d say impatiently. “I don’t have to write a paragraph supporting my opinion that Trent Lott is racist. He’s racist!”

“That’s true, but that doesn’t mean you can be a lazy thinker,” he’d shoot back. “If you don’t have a strong argument, people can take you apart. They’ll take black people apart. You’ll lose what you should win.”

But just as often he listened, and got angry right along with me. One thing we understood is that while we had racial differences, we had the same racial problems.

At the same time, he had racial blind spots; he could still be a white guy with privilege who thought his views should wield more influence than they did. In the new millennium, as the conservative grip on the country tightened during the Bush years, he grew impatient, then angry, with fellow teachers he felt were too complacent about race. He was sometimes dismayed that I was pegged as a black writer when what I wrote should have resonated equally with readers of all races. He hated that.

Our different upbringings made for different outlooks. In Alan’s privilege he expected change; in my non-privilege, I expected struggle. For all his wokeness, he couldn’t escape his American sense of entitlement, and sometimes I watched it from the outside with a kind of bewilderment, even admiration.

But always our back-and-forth kept me thinking, reassessing, curious about the nature of the country’s flaws and, with every new idea Alan dissected, I was more hopeful that the flaws could be repaired someday. He was not nearly as hopeful, but that optimism gap was part of the yin and yang that bound us together. His impassioned analyses of racial disconnection was part of our connection; the historical failure of black and white to cohere became part of our personal coherence that, even as it grew, I never took for granted.

These days I know plenty of outraged white people, good friends among them. But none have Alan’s hard-earned view, his heart, his organic and sometimes abrasive indignation that was part of who he was, not a response to a particular moment or crisis or president. And of course no person, black or white, was as close to me as he was. No other person was my husband.

With Alan I could say all the things too risky or too subtle to say to white people at parties or in public. Today, while I’m determined not to hold back with white folks anymore — in the age of lies-as-truth, honesty feels like the only path left — the not-holding-back feels like a job. It’s not an act of love, at least not in the immediate way it had been for me.

In Alan’s last days, when he was conscious (but unable to speak) and I was sure he’d recover, I tried to re-enlist him in our running conversation. I gestured to the news playing on the TV in his hospital room. “Look, Alan, Trump is running for president,” I exclaimed. “Can you believe it?”

I knew the answer: Of course he believed it. He’d been talking his entire career, and our entire marriage, about the gravitational pull of racial fear and loathing on politics, and Mr. Trump’s swiftly rising appeal was the storm that had been gathering during eight years of Barack Obama.

Yet for the first time, he seemed utterly uninterested in such news; as I ranted at the screen, he turned his eyes away. Maybe he knew what was coming, and knew he wasn’t going to be here for it.

I am living the next adventure by myself, though I take some comfort in living it — surviving it — with his name.

(https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/opinion/sunday/interracial-marriage-trump-mourning.html)

[letsmuiwjezaevbe]

"Is My Little Library Contributing to the Gentrification of My Black Neighborhood?" by Erin Aubry Kaplan via NYT Opinion https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/opinion/gentrification-los-angeles-little-library.html?partner=IFTTT

[louqno-beaqfo]

"Is My Little Library Contributing to the Gentrification of My Black Neighborhood?" by Erin Aubry Kaplan via NYT Opinion https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/opinion/gentrification-los-angeles-little-library.html?partner=IFTTT

[siemsu-kuanri]

"Is My Little Library Contributing to the Gentrification of My Black Neighborhood?" by Erin Aubry Kaplan via NYT Opinion https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/opinion/gentrification-los-angeles-little-library.html?partner=IFTTT

[jaisma-giinvo]

"Is My Little Library Contributing to the Gentrification of My Black Neighborhood?" by Erin Aubry Kaplan via NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/3EyllJa

[dauyye-duivva]

"Is My Little Library Contributing to the Gentrification of My Black Neighborhood?" by Erin Aubry Kaplan via NYT Opinion https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/opinion/gentrification-los-angeles-little-library.html?partner=IFTTT

[koispo-faamzi]

"Is My Little Library Contributing to the Gentrification of My Black Neighborhood?" by Erin Aubry Kaplan via NYT Opinion https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/opinion/gentrification-los-angeles-little-library.html?partner=IFTTT

[electronicstarfishanchor2322]

Is My Little Library Contributing to the Gentrification of My Black Neighborhood?

By Erin Aubry Kaplan Thoughts I had as I watched a white couple browsing books. Published: December 4, 2021 at 04:00PM from Opinion via New York TimesNYT

[koibbo-tuogqa]

"Is My Little Library Contributing to the Gentrification of My Black Neighborhood?" by Erin Aubry Kaplan via NYT Opinion https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/opinion/gentrification-los-angeles-little-library.html?partner=IFTTT

[ciuvba-kouvta]

Is My Little Library Contributing to the Gentrification of My Black Neighborhood?

By Erin Aubry Kaplan Thoughts I had as I watched a white couple browsing books. Published: December 4, 2021 at 02:00PM from NYT Opinion https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/opinion/gentrification-los-angeles-little-library.html?partner=IFTTT via IFTTT

[viabpa-guecpu]

"Is My Little Library Contributing to the Gentrification of My Black Neighborhood?" by Erin Aubry Kaplan via NYT Opinion https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/opinion/gentrification-los-angeles-little-library.html?partner=IFTTT

[wiucnu-feukqo]

"Is My Little Library Contributing to the Gentrification of My Black Neighborhood?" by Erin Aubry Kaplan via NYT Opinion https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/opinion/gentrification-los-angeles-little-library.html?partner=IFTTT

[doedxu-piusso]

"Is My Little Library Contributing to the Gentrification of My Black Neighborhood?" by Erin Aubry Kaplan via NYT Opinion https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/opinion/gentrification-los-angeles-little-library.html?partner=IFTTT

[baijgo-juicqe]

"Is My Little Library Contributing to the Gentrification of My Black Neighborhood?" by Erin Aubry Kaplan via NYT Opinion https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/opinion/gentrification-los-angeles-little-library.html?partner=IFTTT