#every other social media company that is prevalent in american culture is owned by an american company

[srldesigns6277]

Why is it that whenever I wish to scream, I am at work?

[fishoutofcamelot]

Zombie symbolism in media? Body snatchers? That sounds extremely interesting 👀👀👀

OOOOOOOOOOH ARE YOU READY FOR ME TO RANT? CUZ I’M GONNA RANT BABY. YALL WANNA SEE HOW HARD I CAN HYPERFIXATE???

I’ll leave my ramblings under the cut.

The Bodysnatchers thing is a bit quicker to explain so I’ll start with that. Basically, Invasion of the Body Snatchers was released in 1956, about a small town where the people are slowly but surely replaced and replicated by emotionless hivemind pod aliens. It was a pretty obvious metaphor for the red scare and America’s fear of the ‘growing threat of communism’ invading their society. A communist could look like anyone and be anyone, after all.

Naturally, the bodysnatcher concept got rebooted a few times - Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1978), Body Snatchers (1993), and The Invasion (2007), just off the top of my head. You’re all probably very familiar with the core concept: people are slowly being replaced by foreign duplicates. 

But while the monster has remained roughly the same, the theme has not. In earlier renditions, Bodysnatchers symbolized communism. But in later renditions, the narratives shifted to symbolize freedom of expression and individualism - that is, people’s ability to express and think for themselves being taken away. That’s because freedom of thought/individuality is a much more pressing threat on our minds in the current climate. Most people aren’t scared of communists anymore, but we are scared of having our free will taken away from us. 

The best indicator of the era in which a story is created is its villain. Stories written circa 9/11 have villains that are foreign, because foreign terrorism was a big fear in the early 2000s. In the past, villains were black people, because white people were racist (and still are, but more blatantly so in the past). 

Alright, now for the fun part.

ZOMBIES

Although the concept has existed in Haitian voodooism for ages, the first instance of zombies in western fiction was a book called The Magic Island written by William Seabrook in 1929. Basically ol Seabrook took a trip to Haiti and saw all the slaves acting tired and ‘brutish’ and, having learned about the voodoo ‘zombi’, believed the slaves were zombies, and thus put them in his book.

The first zombie story in film was actually an adaptation of Seabrook’s accounts, called White Zombie (1932). It was about a couple who takes a trip to Haiti, only for the woman to be turned into a zombie and enchanted into being a Haitian’s romantic slave. SUPER racist, if you couldn’t tell, but not only does it reflect the state of entertainment of the era - Dracula and Frankenstein had both been released around the same time - but it also reflects American cultural fears. That is, the fear of white people losing their authoritative control over the world. White fright.

Naturally, the box office success of White Zombie inspired a whole bunch of other remakes and spinoffs in the newly minted zombie genre, most of them taking a similar Haitian voodoo approach. Within a decade, zombies had grown from an obscure bit of Haitian lore to a fully integrated part of American pop culture. Movies, songs, books, cocktails, etc. 

But this was also a time for WWII to roll around and, much like the Bodysnatchers, zombie symbolism evolved to fit the times. Now zombies experienced a shift from white fright and ethnic spirituality to something a bit more secular. Now they were a product of foreign science created to perpetuate warmongering schemes. In King of Zombies (1941), a spy uses zombies to try and force a US Admiral to share his secrets. And Steve Sekely’s Revenge of the Zombies (1943) became the first instance of Nazi zombies. 

Then came the atom bomb, and once more zombie symbolism shifted to fears of radiation and communism. The most on-the-nose example of this is Creature With the Atom Brain (1955).

Then came the Vietnam War, and people started fearing an uncontrollable, unconscionable military. In Night of the Living Dead (1968), zombies were caused by radiation from a space probe, combining both nuclear and space-race motifs, as well as a harsh government that would cause you just as much problems as the zombies. One could argue that the zombies in the Living Dead series represent military soldiers, or more likely the military-industrial complex as a whole, which is presented as mindless in its pursuit of violence.

The Living Dead series also introduced a new mainstay to the genre: guns. Military stuff. Fighting. Battle. And that became a major milestone in the evolution of zombie representation in media. This was only exacerbated by the political climate of the time. In the latter half of the 20th century, there were a lot of wars. Vietnam, Korea, Arab Spring, Bay of Pigs, America’s various invasions and attacks on Middle Eastern nations, etc. Naturally the public were concerned by all this fighting, and the nature of zombie fiction very much evolved to match this.

But the late 1900s weren’t just a place of war. They were also a place of increasing economic disparity and inequal wealth distribution. In the 70s and 80s, the wage gap widened astronomically, while consumerism remained steadily on the rise. And so, zombies symbolized something else: late-stage capitalism. Specifically, capitalist consumption - mindless consumption. For example, in Dawn of the Dead (1978), zombies attack a mall, and with it the hedonistic lifestyles of the people taking refuge there. This iteration props up zombies as the consumers, and it is their mindless consumption that causes the fall of the very system they were overindulging in.

Then there was the AIDS scare, and the zombie threat evolved to match something that we can all vibe with here in the time of COVID: contagion. Now the zombie condition was something you could get infected with and turn into. In a video game called Resident Evil (1996), the main antagonist was a pharmaceutical company called the Umbrella Corporation that’s been experimenting with viruses and bio-warfare. In 28 Days Later (2002), viral apes escape a research lab and infect an unsuspecting public.

Nowadays, zombies are a means of expressing our contemporary fears of apocalypse. It’s no secret that the world has been on the brink for a while now, and everyone is waiting with bated breath for the other shoe to drop. Post-apocalypse zombie movies act as simultaneous male power fantasy, expression of contemporary cynicism, an expression of war sentiments, and a product of the zombie’s storied symbolic history. People are no longer able to trust the government, and in many ways people have a hard time trusting each other, and this manifests as an every-man-for-himself survivalist narrative. 

So why have zombies endured for so long, despite changing so much? Why are we so fascinated by them? Well, many say that it’s because zombies are a way for us to express our fears of apocalypse. Communism, radiation, contagion - these are all threats to the country’s wellbeing. Some might even say that zombies represent a threat to conversative America/white nationalism, what with the inclusion of voodooism, foreign entities, and late-stage capitalism being viewed as enemies.

Personally, I might partly agree with the conservative America thing, but I don’t think zombies exist to project our fears onto. That’s just how villains and monsters work in general. In fiction, the conflict’s stakes don’t hit home unless the villain is intimidating. The hero has to fight something scary for us to be invested in their struggles. But the definition of what makes something scary is different for every different generation and social group. Maybe that scary thing is foreign invaders, or illness, or losing a loved one, or a government takeover. As such, the stories of that era mold to fit the fears of that era. It’s why we see so many government conspiracy thrillers right now; it’s because we’re all afraid of the government and what it can do to us.

So if projecting societal fears onto the story’s villain is a commonplace practice, then what makes zombies so special? Why have they lasted so long and so prevalently? I would argue it’s because the concept of a zombie, at its core, plays at a long-standing American ideal: freedom.

Why did people migrate to the New World? Religious freedom. Why did we start the Revolutionary War and become our own country? Freedom from England’s authority. Why was the Civil War a thing? The south wanted freedom from the north - and in a remarkable display of irony, they wanted to use that freedom to oppress black people. Why are we so obsessed with capitalism? Economic freedom.

Look back at each symbolic iteration of the zombie. What’s the common thread? In the 20s/30s, it was about white fright. The fear that black people could rise up against them and take away their perceived ‘freedom’ (which was really just tyrannical authority, but whatever). During WWII, it was about foreign threats coming in and taking over our country. During Vietnam, it became about our military spinning out of control and hecking things up for the rest of us. In the 80s/90s, it was about capitalism turning us into mindless consumers. Then it was about plagues and hiveminds and the collapse of society as a whole, destroying everything we thought we knew and throwing our whole lives into disarray. In just about every symbolic iteration, freedom and power have been major elements under threat.

And even deeper than that, what is a zombie? It’s someone who, for whatever reason, is a mindlessly violent creature that cannot think beyond base animal impulses and a desire to consume flesh. You can no longer think for yourself. Everything that made you who you are is gone.

Becoming a zombie is the ultimate violation of someone’s personal freedom. And that terrifies Americans.

Although an interesting - and concerning - phenomenon is this new wave of wish fulfillment zombie-ism. You know, the gun-toting action movie hero who has the personality of soggy toast and a jaw so chiseled it could decapitate the undead. That violent survivalist notion of living off the grid and being a total badass all the while. It speaks to men who, for whatever reason, feel their masculinity and dominance is under threat. So they project their desires to compensate for their lack of masculine control onto zombie fiction, granting them personal freedom from obligations and expectations (and feminism) to live out their solo macho fantasies by engaging in low- to no-consequence combat. And in doing so, completely disregarding the fact that those same zombies were once people who cruelly had their freedom of self ripped away from them. Gaining their own freedom through the persecution of others (zombies). And if that doesn’t sum up the white conservative experience, I don’t know what does.

So yeah. That’s zombies, y’all.

Thanks for the ask!

[liskantope]

Some thoughts on BLM and our current unrest

[Content warning for death and violence and even sexual abuse (although that’s not part of this week’s issue) and, you know, discussion of a current topic that’s very upsetting for many people. I can’t guarantee that the opinion I express won’t be additionally upsetting although I’m hoping for an open-minded rather than strident tone here. Also, it turned out super long. And I didn’t even get around to the protest vs. rioting discourse!]

This post is long, and since Tumblr for some reason has done away with the light horizontal bars separating sections of writing (I can’t imagine why, and I wish they’d bring it back), I’ll adopt the style of Slate Star Codex and The Last Psychiatrist to mark different sections.

I.

(The following hypothetical situation is inspired by the crimes of Jerry Sandusky of Penn State and Larry Nassar of Michigan State.)

Suppose it becomes public knowledge that in many American universities there are officials working in athletics departments who are using their programs to gain access to children and teenagers for the purpose of sexually abusing them. Say it is discovered that this has been going on for decades at most of these universities, with the perpetrators using their privilege and power to keep the suspicions of the higher-up administrators on the downlow. This would of course become a dominating national news item and lead to a public conversation about how poorly structured the system must be at universities to allow for such despicable crimes to go on, how we as a society are putting people in power who care more about their power than about the basic safety of children and teenagers, and so on. If enough people felt like university administrations or state governments were refusing to take action towards dissolving these corrupt systems, or if they disagreed with the actions being taken, there might be full-scale protests or even riots along with the vigils that would take place in any case. I mean, I believe all of this is basically what happened when the Sandusky and Nassar situations broke out some years back.

Now suppose that in addition, when looking at all these horrific revelations from universities all around the country, it became noticeable that the victims of these sex crimes were disproportionately young people growing up in poverty; let’s say fully one third of the victims were growing up in households whose annual income was under $30,000. (I don’t recall the Sandusky case in great detail but something like that was probably true there to a more dramatic extent since he got access to his victims through a program designed for underprivileged children.) This makes the situation feel even more tragic -- don’t kids from low-income backgrounds suffer enough disadvantages already? These monsters that are protected by The System are adept at preying on the most vulnerable, and clearly this (hypothetical but altogether not unrealistic) phenomenon highlights the vulnerability of those who are not economically privileged.

Now in such a situation, class issues would definitely become at least a minor part of the discourse, but I have a hard time imagining that the entire main thrust of the public outrage would focus on classism, even if (and this is something I can’t imagine either!) the only cases being projected by the media to become common public knowledge, out of the whole series of university athletics sex crimes, were the ones where mainly poor kids and teenagers were targeted. In fact, I expect that if any media outlet tried to present the entire thing as being a class issue and implied that it affected only poor kids, there would be a lot of backlash especially on the grounds of this coming across as a big middle finger to the higher-income-background molestation victims. I just don’t see it happening. Primarily, the outrage would be centered on the fact that university administrations allow high-ranking people in their athletics departments get away with despicable violations of young people for decades. The fact that a disproportionately high number of those young people are from underprivileged backgrounds would be treated as sort of a secondary issue, if properly noticed by the broader public at all.

So, if you’ve read this far you probably see where I’m going with this. And I know that the above hypothetical scenario furnishes nowhere near a perfect analogy to what has people riled up right now. But why is it that in my hypothetical nightmare crime scenario, the prevalence of the crime itself (rather than which demographic is disproportionately on the receiving end) is what constitutes the outrage, whereas in the real-life scenario of numerous documented instances of police brutality and murder, the entire thrust of the public outrage is centered on the notion that this is all about racism, that yeah there must be something seriously amiss in a system that lets cops get away with brutal violence towards innocent civilians but pretty much every single statement expressing that sentiment will frame it in terms of racism while the existence white victims of police brutality is essentially never even acknowledged?

From what I can see, in this age where everyday happenings can easily be recorded by random bystanders and the recordings can easily become accessible to the public, we are seeing evidence that a number of American cops are way, way too liberal with lethal violence, either through direct training or through a tendency towards paranoia of how dangerous a civilian under arrest might be or through psychopathic tendencies that attract certain kinds of people to a profession where brutally violent behavior is too easily excused in the courts after the fact. I don’t know to what degree these relatively few pieces of documented footage reflect a large part of the police force rather than just “a few bad apples”, but on some level it doesn’t matter -- an event like the murder of George Floyd should not be tolerated and the fact that many such instances are happening every year seems unacceptable. This is true regardless of whether Floyd’s race actually played any significant part in Derek Chauvin’s decision to apply very excessive force. Then there are statistics to reckon with -- I don’t have the skillset that some have for knowing where to look up data and rationally analyzing it, but to my understanding it’s quite unambiguous that American law enforcement officers kill a lot more people than the police forces of most other countries, and this would seem to point to a serious problem. I have generally heard that in absolute terms, in fact more white men are killed this way than black men, but relative to the ratio of white people to black people, black men are killed disproportionately often. Of course there seems to be no room whatsoever for discussion of any possible reason this could be aside from purely racist motives on the parts of the cops, which is certainly one of my issues with the whole topic, but let’s set that aside for the moment and assume for the sake of argument that this disparity is entirely attributable to anti-black racism. Even with this assumption, does it make sense to present the entire issue of police brutality as a purely racial one?

Here is another analogy to something that is not only non-hypothetical but is an even bigger current situation: the pandemic. It’s frequently been remarked on that Covid19 has been killing at a significantly higher rate among racial minorities. And yet the broader framing of the crisis we’re in hasn’t been that it’s an African-American issue or that every failure of government officials to respond effectively is primarily an instantiation of racism. The racial component of this is treated secondarily, in fact with far less emphasis than the direct crisis which affects everyone in the country even if not in equal measures.

With the murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Abery, as with every other story of a cop killing of a black person that goes viral, it’s not only that the narrative frames the race component as the primary issue -- the race component is framed as the only issue. This is done in such an absolute and unquestioning manner that I’m still a little taken aback whenever I see each new “We denounce racism!” announcement from almost every company whose mailing system I’m in: my Unitarian Universalist organization, the university I work for, Lyft, Airbnb, etc., not that any of them actually suggest a plan of action beyond donating to Black Lives Matter and other related organizations.

I think I can answer my own questions about why the narrative is coming out this way. Some areas of social justice enjoy a much more prestigious position in America than others do, and racism seems to dominate all the rest. (I’ve come to see this as a very American thing, no doubt due to the exceptionally dramatic nature of my country’s struggles against racial oppression, although it’s probably the case in Canada as well and maybe to a comparable extent in other Anglophone countries.) There is no surer way to make an issue more hot-button than by framing it as a racial issue, except in the unusual case (as in my Covid example) that the issue is actually of urgent and immediate concern to all citizens. Opposition to something like police brutality could have some momentum on its own, but as motivation for activism it has nowhere near the mighty strength in our culture that anti-racism does. In the hypothetical scenario about child abuse at universities, we have one type of social injustice, economic inequality, which has mostly been relegated to the background in the recent history of social activism (yes, Bernie Sanders has had a significant following, but my impression is that even many of his most diehard supporters get more passionate about racial inequality than economic inequality, at least when it comes to fiscal issues other than health care reform). Whereas child molestation is condemned in the strongest terms by our society perhaps even more universally than racism is (even though this universality makes it less of a cause for energetic activism -- I never hear anyone complain that “we live in a molestation culture” or anything like that). So, issues viewed as racial have far more memetic endurance than non-racial issues or even the exact same fundamental issues when not viewed from a racial angle.

Or, here is another way that I’ve considered looking at it: because police violence happens disproportionately to African-Americans, police violence could be considered to be “an African-American issue”, and since anti-racism activism is already quite a strong force in modern American culture, the issue of police brutality will naturally find an outlet to the public through the lens of African-American issues. Therefore, this is the only angle from which most of us will ever see it.

Of course the obvious thing that someone would surely point out here is that pretty much all of the examples of police brutality we’ve been seeing for years have white people victimizing black people (George Zimmerman did not present to me as white from the moment I first glanced at him, and by many definitions he is a PoC, but I guess he’s close enough to white that people were able to ignore this). Therefore it seems logical to assume that anti-black racism is the only lens to view these events through. Well, it would be logical except that we should all be able to think critically enough to realize that there are probably tons of videos out there of innocent white people being victimized by cops but those aren’t the ones that go viral. In fact, videos of black people being victimized by non-white cops probably also don’t get very far in the memosphere* -- it’s occurred to me that perhaps if the Asian policeman on the scene had been the one in the center of the frame pinning Floyd to the ground, this atrocity might never have become public knowledge!

(*Did I just make up that term? Google isn’t showing anything.)

And honestly, for this reason, I can’t help feeling particularly bad right now for loved ones of nonblack people who were victims of such crimes while being treated as if their cases didn’t exist.

This is not me trying to covertly imply support for “All Lives Matter” here. I’ve never felt the slightest bit of attraction to that counter-hashtag, which has always struck me as subtly obnoxious in implying that Black Lives Matter’s name is equivalent to saying “only black lives matter”, which of course BLM is not saying. Black lives do matter and in many ways still constantly get devalued and it is good that there’s an activist group out there whose main purpose is to stand up for them. But my discussion above does point to a specific issue -- probably the biggest of two or three issues -- I have with BLM. It would be one thing to say, “Police brutality can be considered a black issue since it affects black people disproportionately, so we should form a Black Lives Matter group and include it as one of the things we want to fight against.” Instead, BLM’s rhetoric strongly implies, “Police brutality is entirely a black issue and we’ll round off the entirety of it to racism and make opposition to it our main plank”. (Compare, from an secularist activist group, “Anti-gay bigotry often arises from fundamentalist religion and the justification for anti-gay-rights legislation threatens separation of church and state; therefore we should consider it an atheist/secularist issue and place gay rights issues among our concerns” vs. “Anti-gay bigotry and legislation is simply a manifestation of religion’s attempt to dominate non-religion so we should make opposition to it our main plank and not acknowledge or stand up for gay Christians.” Again, not a perfect analogy, but I hope it shows where I’m coming from.)

II.

I already wrote a post exactly four years ago describing and criticizing what I called “protest culture”. My point in linking to it here is not to revisit the discussion about Bernie Sanders or even the question of protesters’ deep-down motives but to endorse the following paragraph describing the kind of protest activism I felt (and still feel) could be helpful:

I definitely think there’s an important place in our culture for organized protest.  Sometimes we ordinary citizens need to show our dissatisfaction to the higher-ups in a way that they are forced to notice and not ignore.  But I strongly prefer protests that express dissent from a particular action, propose a concrete solution, and include many people who are able to make nuanced arguments in favor of this solution.  If there is no good consensus as to a serious solution, then I’ll settle for some particular action that is being protested against.  For instance, I would have proudly joined the marches against the war in Vietnam had I been around for it, and would have joined the marches against the war in Iraq had I been a little older at the time.  I would consider joining protests against, for instance, particular amendments I feel strongly about.  I did not, on the other hand, feel comfortable with the “99 percent” movement.  What was it expressing a sentiment against, exactly, apart from the very vague notion that a few people at the top screw things over for the rest of us?  (And by the way, I suspect that demonizing the entire top 1% was too heavy-handed; it’s probably only some in the top .01% who have been doing the main damage.)  There seemed to be little organization to this movement, and little common purpose except “let’s protest for the cause of being vaguely left-wing!”  The best argument I remember hearing in its favor was when a student explained to me the main strategy behind the movement: they would essentially fight guerilla-style by occupying large areas for a very long amount of time in a way that the top politicians couldn’t ignore, never, ever giving it up until things change in Washington.  But I was still pretty sure that at some point, the movement would have to die down, and was willing to bet that this would happen before anything changed in Washington.

I’ve never felt as fervently as I do now that too many law enforcement officers in the US are out of control and some kind of reform needs to be done (or at least strongly considered, in a serious conversation) to the system so that it can be effective in keeping them in check and outlawing certain forms of excessive force. There’s a lot I don’t understand about the demands and risks involved in law enforcement, but I really can’t imagine how there’s any possible excuse for what Officer Chauvin did, or for his colleagues who stood by and watched him do it. One reason I’m bringing up everything I did in the section above is that a massive protest movement based entirely on opposing racism seems to me like the exact wrong way to bring about the kind of reform we need, in part because it fails to recognize that the link from the bare facts of these events to possible racist motives is far less direct than the link to the overpowered nature of American law enforcement.

What is a campaign centered on “Be less racist!” possibly going to accomplish? Yelling at the police to be less racist isn’t going to change the behavior of individual cops who might be subconsciously racist but don’t realize it, many of whom are likely to react with defensiveness (because racism on an abstract level is sufficiently shamed in modern western culture that nobody likes to admit to themselves that they’re being racist). It’s even less likely to change the behavior of individual cops who are maliciously racist. It’s not going to change the policies set in place for law enforcement when, in this day and age, it would be highly illegal and unconstitutional to have explicitly racist policies in the first place. (It can be argued that some of these policies are a part of systemic racism, but then in my opinion the activist movement should focus on attacking those specific policies.)

In fact, I can’t think of any situation, however race-related, where I expect it helps to yell “Be less racist!” except for when (1) you are protesting against a particular law which discriminates against people of a certain (minority) race; or (2) you are denouncing a particular candidate or person in power who has explicitly endorsed racism in public or in private. Both of these scenarios are highly rare in 2020. Maybe there are other neighboring scenarios I’m not thinking of at the moment, but I’m pretty sure our current scenario isn’t one of them.

I imagine that if we set race aside for a moment and focus on police reform, by waiting for background information on the Floyd case to come out and piecing together what led to this injustice and pinpointing which factors led to it, a difference could be made. I’m not saying that this should all be done dispassionately, and in fact acting with passion and emotional force is crucial. And I’m not saying that in the wake of such an obvious murder everyone should just stay quiet until more facts come out. It makes sense to cry out in pain and anger as an immediate reaction, and I’m not going to criticize anyone for doing this, especially someone who feels closer to the tragedy (yes, including through shared racial background) than I do. But letting this get immediately drowned in a rampage against perceived racism and only that, against a system that has shown time and time again that it clearly doesn’t think itself racist at all and perhaps (in at least most of its components) has no deliberate intention of being, doesn’t seem likely to produce anything but further acrimony and polarization.

[TL;DR for these last two sections: it would seem like a more effective response to focus on police brutality and overpowered-ness as the main issue rather than making it all about race.]

III.

I forced myself to watch as much of the video of George Floyd’s final hours and minutes as I could. I didn’t actually succeed in finding the full video, and maybe that’s for the best, because what I did see chilled me to the bone and distressed me more than almost any real-life footage I’ve ever seen. I’m not as eloquent as some at putting my raw emotions in writing and don’t know the words to describe how twisted up it made me feel to “witness” an obvious murder of a man whose greatest “crime” was resisting getting pushed into a police car, and to watch him dying one of the most undignified deaths I can imagine ever being forced on anyone. I felt momentarily physically ill and wanted to cry.

Others in my orbit -- mostly white people; my social bubbles have always been disproportionately white and Asian and certainly nonblack -- have expressed a similar emotional reaction to mine except with the added factor of disgust at the obvious racism present. This was just simply not part of my immediate emotional reaction. On a cognitive level I am aware that there clearly has to be some degree of anti-black racism in law enforcement, even independent of classism and other factors, and that could be of some relevance in any individual case (although it would seem very tricky to assess how much). But this awareness doesn’t have time to kick in when I open a video or news story that’s already been presented to me as “another black man killed by racist cop” which reminds me that this is embedded in a particular media narrative and makes me feel instinctively on guard against letting my perceptions be colored by it.

Black people seeing these apparently all feel on the level of deep, fundamental knowledge that this happened to Floyd because he was black and that it’s a fate they have to constantly fear happening to themselves, or at least that’s what the white people around me are constantly claiming. I feel epistemically helpless when it comes to knowing what the “average” (rather than one of those on the forefront of racial activism) African-American’s take on this is, or how fearful the “average” African-American is of the police on a daily basis as compared to a white person’s, especially prior to the age when videos of police abuse started going viral.

But I’m certain that a significant part of the African-American community is right now in a deep pain that I can’t really imagine, because I don’t quite know how it feels to perceive one horrible tragedy as indicative of something that is done to attack a specific minority that I belong to.

I expect that some of them learn about an incident like this, and an incident like the one with Ahmoud Arbery, and feel on the level of social intuition (I think I’ve sometimes called this “social sense”), developed from a web of personal experiences, that these individual terrible choices clearly had a lot to do with the victims being black. I would be a hypocrite to fault someone for reaching a strong conviction based on this kind of social intuition, because I do it myself all the time -- in fact, I often express such conclusions on this blog. I feel less qualified to rely on this social intuition and my own experience when it comes to race issues, but I invoke it all the time on this blog when I talk about male-female dynamics in order to argue on controversial position on gender relations, for instance, because I do have lifelong ample experience with men and women interacting.

If many black people in America have a deep instinctual feeling for the racial aspect of many of these attacks, then I do acknowledge that a lot of that is probably coming from somewhere other than media narratives. It might come from everyday interactions with police, observing that they are stopped and treated hostilely by the police than their white friends seem to be, or who knows what else. And those voices with their explanations need to be at least listened to. I wish it were easier to hear them through all the tribalistic noise and confusion.

So trying to better understand all this is part of my struggle at the moment. This post might not age well -- I wouldn’t be surprised if I view some of my turns of phrase in this section of it with some embarrassment even sometime in the near future -- but I need to commit myself to trying.

Anyway, I guess all of this is to say that my lengthy arguments above aren’t meant to claim that the instances of police brutality we’ve been seeing aren’t related in some way to racism, but that reflexively framing them in terms of racism seems guaranteed to bring only more pain to an already painful situation.

[dhallucr-blog]

Nike’s Kaepernick Campaign: Hegemony, Alienation, & Flak

Nike’s Colin Kaepernick campaign and President Donald Trump’s fixed attention on the Kaepernick campaign are examples of how those in power use the media to reinforce Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony in “Hegemony, Intellectuals and the State.” Whereas Nike exploits lower tiers’ alienation in a capitalist society, a concept explained by Arthur Asa Berger in “Alienation” and “The Consumer Society”, President Trump deploys flak, the fourth propagandist filtre listed by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in “Propaganda Model”, to sway public opinion concerning Nike’s Kaepernick endorsement.

Nike’s advertisement featuring partnership with professional football player Colin Kaepernick critiques America’s hegemonic practices while the campaign itself epitomizes hegemonic practices. According to Gramsci, “the attempt to exercise power will always be made to ensure that force will appear to be based on the consent of the majority, expressed by the so-called organs of public opinion—newspapers and associations— which, therefore, in certain situations, are artificially multiplied” (75). The “believe in something even if it means sacrificing everything” campaign attempts to win the consent of subordinate groups through coercion. For example, market research has shown that Nike customers are mostly marginalized youths. Thirty-Mile Zone Sports calculates that “13% of Americans identify as African American, yet 18% of Nike buyers are black. Hispanics account for 16% of the population, but represent 19% of Nike buyers. And, Asians account for 3% of the population, but 5% of Nike customers” (TMZ sports). Given that Nike’s consumer base reflected a large number of minorities pre-Kaepernick endorsement, the advertisement implies more of a power move to manipulate lower tiers into a buying mood. How ever Nike expresses pro equality for people of color throughout the media the company is still a leader in violence overseas involving child labor, poor working conditions, and underpay for people of color. Clearly Nike’s endeavor sides more with sustaining capitalist hegemony than exercising activism.

Evoking emotion to manipulate marginalized audiences to spend their hard working money is a propagandist technique to maintain the hegemonic class system and shows an exploitative relationship between high and low tiers. According to Arthur Asa Berger, “People must be driven to consume, must be made crazy to consume, for its consumption that maintains the economic system. Thus the alienation generated by a capitalist system is functional, for the anxieties and miseries generated by such a system tend to be assuaged by impulsive consumption” (52). As Nike co-opts a social movement for its own private gain, people of color are emotionally moved by the company’s political stance and are even more motivated to consumption, a symptom of their alienation. For example, post-Kaepernick advertisement Nike had made $6 billion, claims Alex Abad-Santos on Vox magazine. That’s $6 billion Nike has made off of the alienated spirit in America’s capitalist society and not a portion of the revenue went to scholarship, charity, or society’s alienated. Berger quotes Karl Marx, “Every man speculates upon creating a new need in order to force him to a new sacrifice, to place him in a new dependence, and to entice him with a new pleasure and thereby in economic ruin. Everyone tries to establish over others an alien power in order to find there the satisfaction of his own egotistical need” (52). It appears that Nike established an alien power over subordinate groups especially given that their campaign diverted people’s attention from police brutality and their core message once analyzed translates to “buy shoes” which thus maintains the consumer culture and America’s hegemonic class system.

Though there has been an equilibrium of positive and negative media attention regarding Kaepernick being the face of Nike’s 30th anniversary campaign, President Donald Trump used his power and influence to bring more attention to negative media responses by producing flak to sustain hegemonic structuralism. According to Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, “The producers of flak add to one another’s strength and reinforce the command of political authority in it’s news-management activities. The government is a major producer of flak, regularly assailing, threatening, and ‘correcting’ the media, trying to contain any deviations from the established line.” (28) President Donald Trump over a multitude of social media tweets has publicly rejected Nike’s decision to make Kaepernick the new face of their brand for the reason that Trump deems Kaepernick unpatriotic and his actions (kneeling during the national anthem) disrespectful to the American flag. One of Trump’s tweets read:

“Just like the NFL, whose ratings have done WAY DOWN, Nike is getting absolutely killed with anger and boycotts. I wonder if they had any idea that it would be this way? As far as the NFL is concerned, I just find it hard to watch, and always will, until they stand for the FLAG!” (Twitter).

Many right-wing conservatives, the bulk of Trump’s voters and social media followers, in response to Trump’s censure, took to twitter to burn their Nike sneakers. Trump’s power and influence to produce flak may have to an extent persuaded public opinion as Trump used propagandist techniques by associating two unrelated concepts to push hegemonic structuralism. As Trump’s statement implies, one can’t be patriotic and stand against systemic injustices, one can’t be patriotic and continue to watch the National Football League when players kneel, and those who approve of Nike’s Kaepernick campaign aren’t after all true patriots.

Overall, both Nike and President Donald Trump are large entities prevalent in mass media that act within hegemonic structuralism to main existing class systems such as capitalism and social stratification. The aftermath of Colin Kaepernick protesting police brutality led to Nike and President Trump, being powerful influencers and leaders’, to deter the public from America’s injustices to support private interests. For example, Nike manipulated its consumers’ alienation in society to support a cause that Nike fails to support in its entirety other than through motivating people to buy their shoes. Further, Trump has also deterred the public from the social movements political message by translating Kaepernick’s protest to unpatriotic. Both used media to exploit and mislead the masses and in doing so have acted to maintain hegemony.

Works cited

Abad-Santos, Alex. “Nike's Colin Kaepernick Ad Sparked a Boycott - and Earned $6 Billion for Nike.” Vox, Vox Magazine, 24 Sept. 2018, www.vox.com/2018/9/24/17895704/nike-colin-kaepernick-boycott-6-billion.

Berger, Arthur.“Alienation” and “The Consumer Society” in Media Analysis Techniques.6th edition. San Francisco State University, USA.

Gramsci, Antonio.  “Hegemony, Intellectuals and the State,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey, pp. 75-80. New York: Routledge, 1994[2013].

Herman, Edward and Chomsky, Noam. “A Propaganda Model,” in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), pp. 1-35.

Staff, TMZ. “Nike's Colin Kaepernick Deal Adds Up When You See Customer Data ... And We Did.” TMZ, TMZ.com, 10 Sept. 2018, www.tmz.com/2018/09/06/colin-kaepernick-nike-contract-urban-consumers-market-research/.

Trump, Donald (@realdonaldtrump). “Just like the NFL, whose ratings have done WAY DOWN, Nike is getting absolutely killed with anger and boycotts. I wonder if they had any idea that it would be this way? As far as the NFL is concerned, I just find it hard to watch, and always will, until they stand for the FLAG!” Sept 5, 2018. 6:39 AM. Tweet.

[research-alexlondon]

Updated Paragraph Plan

At this stage I wanted to update my paragraph plan and slightly refine it before going forward with my writing

KEYWORDS women, femininity, objectification, media, advertising, sexualisation, stereotyping

ABSTRACT -want to start with a quote or rhetorical question - i am thinking of using “is the casual objectification of women so commonplace that we should all just suck it up, roll over, and accept defeat? I hope not” - Mayberry -media has a lot of control of ones identity and self, which leads to poor messages coming through the media -gender and sexualisation starts in advertising  -my aims for the commentary- introduce contexts (low self-esteem and body image issues in women & constructing gender roles) -my image- demonstrate there is not one type of beauty, every woman is beautiful despite their dissimilarities with the model shown across media

CONTEXTS first context para- the reinforcement of the ‘ideal’ female body in advertising & media causes ongoing mental health effects in women, particularly around self-esteem and body image

-introduce context in starter sentence -visual advertising becoming colossal as well as digital consumption growing -this means constant exposure to advertising and therefore reinforcement of the ‘ideal’ model -“few women believe they have acceptable bodies, and the media nurture this insecurity and self-hatred, pounding away at the expectation of perfection” - Estelle Disch  -implications include EDs, low self-esteem, body dissatisfaction & depression - American Journal of Law & Medicine  -become unachievable standard over-time- “twenty years ago fashion models weighed 8% less than the average female. Today, models weigh 23% less than the average female” - Jean Kilbourne -companies use this to sell their products- consumers think their product will make them look like the model  -mostly effects a young age bracket due to their online consumption habits and naivety -also effects the way men view women’s bodies 

second context para- the role that gender stereotyping plays in advertisements has a domino effect on gender norms in real life / creates ideas of gender imbalance

-introduce context in starter sentence -define gender, how it is a social construct - socially prescribed roles, behaviours and preferences and are ‘culturally constructed’ - Abel  -the ideas of gender norms and what is masculine/feminine have been shown through advertising -dependency, nurture, concern with beauty, sexuality and objectivity are the gender roles women are given - Cortese -brands want to capture and hold consumers attention and are therefore unconcerned with the messages they send -relationships between men and women in ads are also skewed- men are positioned above ‘in power’ while women are below them  -although the stereotypes and relationships are seen to be decreasing - Hovland - it is only because they are becoming more subtle - Wolin - meaning we are processing these subconsciously  -this subliminal processing can cause issues in future- effecting the way society members make decisions and gives a bias towards certain ideas they are taught - Ruch  -gender imbalance leads to issues in society, this is the root due to our consumption of visual images  -domestic abuse increases due to this (not sure if i want to add this yet) 

METHODS first method para- visual storytelling

-definition starter sentence - “a story told primarily through the use of visual media” - Definitons.net -categories include illustration, photography, media, and infographics - Ron - and are meant to entertain, inform or persuade the consumers - Williams -visual consumers are emerging faster than ever because of technology becoming so popular - Oblinger  -visuals allow consumers to process the information faster, and more efficiently in a way text cannot - Lankow -we are exposed to visual stories every day - Kress & van Leeuwen - so consumers don’t process the works automatically but instead subconsciously - Avgerinou - this means reinforced ideas are what stick with us the most -due to this subconscious examination and more exposure than every - Oblinger - the full extent of the effects this has on consumers can be blurred -this method is important to examine as it is so prevalent and relates to audiences -can be taken further than advertising - such as awareness campaigns etc.

second method para- photography

-dates back to 1839 with a scientific introduction -methods have been the same throughout time, e.g. framing, positioning, lighting, costuming -advertising photography is used to convince buyers by selling a story, showing what it ‘represents’ - Delong - opposed to commercial photography which is more focused on making the product the hero  -objectification of women starts in the photography -photographic advertising has increased with the rise of technology, editing softwares are used more frequently than ever because of this demonstrating a false image -more harmful messages more frequently  -this method is well-used and be powerful to consumers, therefore it is important to consider

CONCLUSION -summarise that negative implications come from the objectification of women within the sex -while progress has been made to display more ‘natural’ looking women, there is still a way to go and body image issues are prevalent in our society -in response to this issue, i will combat through my own photographic procedures, and what i display to the public  -i will display a wide range of women in my work, and demonstrate empowerment of all natural bodies - therefore won’t warp them from its natural shape -if i am to show a relationship between a woman and a man i will show it as equal, not either is more powerful/ over-arching than the other -finish with a quote- i am thinking of “the representation of women in the society, especially in mass media, has been the most delusional act ever done on the grounds of human existence” - Abhikit Naskar - The Bengal Tigress: A treatise on Gender Equality

[jamesstegall]

How digital beauty filters perpetuate colorism

When Lise was a young teenager in Georgia, her classmates bullied her relentlessly. She had moved with her family from Haiti a few years earlier, and she didn’t fit in with the other students. They teased her about her accent, claimed she “smelled weird,” and criticized the food she ate.  But most often they would attack her with remarks about her dark complexion. Sometimes teachers would send her home from school because she couldn’t stop crying. “I remember going home and I would take those copper wire things that you scrub dishes with,” she says. “I would go to the bathroom and I would take my mom’s bleach cream and scrub my skin with it.” 

And it wasn’t just white classmates. Black students harassed her too—for being an outsider, for being too different. She remembers them asking, “Why is she so dark?” 

Just when she thought it couldn’t get worse, the phone in her palm became an endless stream of pictures of beautiful, lighter-skinned women getting dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of likes and affirming comments. She slowly began to notice that the world wanted parts of her—like her curves and her lips—but not things like her dark skin or her hair. Not her whole self, all together. 

As she struggled to cope with the abuse, Lise convinced herself that the darkness of her skin was to blame. And social media platforms and the visual culture of the internet suggested the same thing. 

Even among those closest to her, the undesirability of her darkness was reinforced. She grew to realize that her mom, aunts, and friends all used the skin-lightening creams she’d borrowed after school, many of which contain toxins and even carcinogens. It was confusing: her community fought hard against racism, but some of the prejudice she experienced came from Black people themselves. 

And social media was just making it worse.

The prejudice Lise experienced—colorism—has a long history, driven by European ideals of beauty that associate lighter skin with purity and wealth, darker tones with sin and poverty. Though related to racism, it’s distinct in that it can affect people regardless of their race, and can have different effects on people of the same background. 

Colorism exists in many countries. In India, people with darker skin were traditionally ranked lower in the caste system. In China, light skin is linked to beauty and nobility. In the US, not only Black people face colorism; white Italian or Greek people with darker skin can experience it too. Historically, when African-Americans were enslaved, those with lighter skin were often given more domestic tasks where those with darker skin were more likely to work in the fields.

These prejudices have been part of the social and media landscape for a long time, but the advent of digital images and Photoshop created new ways for colorism to manifest. In June 1994, notoriously, Newsweek and Time both ran cover images of O.J. Simpson’s mug shot during his murder trial—but on Time’s cover, his skin was markedly darker. The difference sparked outrage: Time had darkened the image in what the magazine’s photo illustrator claimed was an attempt to evoke a more “dramatic tone”. But the editing reflected that the darker the man, the more criminal the American public assumes him to be. 

This association has very real consequences. A 2011 study from Villanova University found a direct link between the severity of sentences for 12,000 incarcerated women and the darkness of their complexion. 

And today, thanks to the prevalence of selfies and face filters, digital colorism has spread. With Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook a part of billions of people’s everyday lives, many of us find that people see far more pictures of us than ever before. But there are biases built into these systems. At a basic level, the imaging chips found in most personal cameras have pre-set ranges for skin tones, making it technically impossible to accurately capture the real variety of complexions. 

Over 200 million people use Snapchat Lenses every day, some of them to lighten their skin tone. Other filters and automatic enhancing features can do the same on Instagram and TikTok.

And the images that do get taken are often subject to alteration. Snapchat reports that over 200 million people use its filter product, Lenses, every day. Some of them use it to lighten their skin tone; other filters and automatic enhancing features can do the same on Instagram and TikTok. Photo technologies and image filters can do this in ways that are almost imperceptible. Meanwhile, social media algorithms reinforce the popularity of people with lighter skin to the detriment of those with darker skin. Just this week, Twitter’s image-cropping algorithm was found to prefer faces that are lighter, thinner, and younger.  

Selfie-esteem

We’ve reported before on the ways in which digital technologies are narrowing beauty standards. The phenomenon has led to the concept of the “Instagram face,” a particular look that’s easily accessible through the proliferation of editing tools. Photos reflecting this look, with a small nose, big eyes, and fuller lips, attract more comments and likes, leading recommendation algorithms to prioritize them. We also interviewed researchers who say beauty ideals are narrowing even more dramatically and quickly than they expected—with especially profound effects on the way young girls, in particular, see themselves and shape their identity. 

But it could be particularly catastrophic for women with darker complexions, says Ronald Hall, a professor at Michigan State University and an expert on colorism. As more European looks are increasingly held up as an ideal, “these young girls imitate these behaviors, and those who are super dark-complected see no way out,” he says. “Those are the ones who are most at risk for harming themselves.” 

That harm can involve bleaching or other risky body treatments: the skin-lightening industry has grown rapidly and is now worth more than $8 billion worldwide each year. But beyond physical risks, researchers and activists have also begun documenting troubling emotional and psychological effects of online colorism.

Amy Niu researches selfie-editing behavior as part of her PhD in psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In 2019, she conducted a study to determine the effect of beauty filters on self-image for American and Chinese women. She took pictures of 325 college-aged women and, without telling them, applied a filter to some photos. She then surveyed the women to measure their emotions and self-esteem when they saw edited or unedited photos. Her results, which have not yet been published, found that Chinese women viewing edited photos felt better about themselves, while American women (87% of whom were white) felt about the same whether their photos were edited or not.

Niu believes that the results show there are huge differences between cultures when it comes to “beauty standards and how susceptible people are to those beauty filters.” She adds, “Technology companies are realizing it, and they are making different versions [of their filters] to tailor to the needs of different groups of people.” 

This has some very obvious manifestations. Niu, a Chinese woman living in America, uses both TikTok and Douyin, the Chinese version (both are made by the same company, and share many of the same features, although not the same content.) The two apps both have “beautify” modes, but they are different: Chinese users are given more extreme smoothing and complexion lightening effects. 

She says the differences don’t just reflect cultural beauty standards—they perpetuate them. White Americans tend to prefer filters that make their skin tanner, teeth whiter, and eyelashes longer, while Chinese women prefer filters that make their skin lighter.  

Niu worries that the vast proliferation of filtered images is making beauty standards more uniform over time, especially for Chinese women. “In China, the beauty standard is more homogeneous,” she says, adding that the filters “erase lots of differences to our faces” and reinforce one particular look. 

“It’s really bad”

Amira Adawe has observed the same dynamic in the way young girls of color use filters on social media. Adawe is the founder and  executive director of Beautywell, a Minnesota-based nonprofit aimed at combating colorism and skin-lightening practices. The organization runs programs to educate young girls of color about online safety, healthy digital behaviors, and the dangers of physical skin lightening. 

Adawe says she often has to inform the girls in her workshops that their skin is being lightened by social media filters. “They think it’s normal. They’re like, ‘Oh, this is not skin lightening, Amira. This is just a filter,’” she says. “A lot of these young girls use these filters and think, ‘Oh my God, I look beautiful.’”

“They think it’s normal… [but] it’s contributing to this notion that you’re not beautiful enough.”

Amira Adawe, Beautywell

It’s so easy to do—with a few clicks, users can make their appearance more similar to everyone else’s ideal—that many young women end up assuming a lighter-skinned identity online. This makes it easier to find acceptance in the digital world, but it can also make it harder for them to identify with their real complexion. 

When Adawe explains how using a face filter can be part of a cycle of colorism, she is often met with resistance. The filters have become essential to the way some girls see themselves. 

“It’s really bad.” she says. “And it’s contributing to this notion that you’re not beautiful enough.” 

And it’s complicated regardless of your skin tone.

Halle, a single biracial woman in her mid-20s, thinks a lot about her own racial identity. She says most people would use the term “ambiguous” to describe her appearance. “I have whiter features,” she says. “My skin complexion is lighter than some other mixed-race girls’, and my hair is less curly.” She also used to be a regular user of dating apps. And from conversations with her friends who have darker complexions, she realized that her experience on dating apps was very different from theirs.

“Quite candidly, we compare matches and number of matches,” she says. “That is where I started to realize: wait a minute, there’s something going on here. My friends who identify as Black or Afro-Latina don’t get as many matches.” 

It’s already known that beauty-scoring algorithms, which rank the attractiveness of images, give higher scores to whiter women. In March, we reported on how the world’s largest face recognition company, Face++, sells a racially biased beauty scoring algorithm that it markets to digital platforms, and online dating sites in particular.

Halle says her experience on these apps reflects the wider world, too. “This is deeply rooted in racism, colorism, and everything that’s happening in our society,” she says. The experience became so frustrating for her that she deleted all her dating apps. MIT Technology Review has reached out to many dating sites to ask whether they use beauty-scoring algorithms for matches, but none will confirm or deny. 

Even if they do not use systems like Face++, however, they do use recommendation algorithms to learn user preferences over time. And this is another way that colorism and bias can creep in and be perpetuated. 

Recommendations based on user preferences often reflect the biases of the world—in this case, the diversity problems that have long been apparent in media and modeling. Those biases have in turn shaped the world of online influencers, so that many of the most popular images are, by default, of people with lighter skin. An algorithm that interprets your behavior inside such a filter bubble might assume that you dislike people with darker skin. And it gets worse: recommendation algorithms are also known to have an anchoring effect, in which their output reinforces users’ unconscious biases and can even change their preferences over time. 

Meanwhile, platforms including TikTok have been accused of intentionally “shadow-banning” content from some Black creators, especially those discussing the Black Lives Matter movement or racism in general. That diminishes their reach, and the cycle reinforces itself further. (In a statement, a TikTok spokesperson said “We unequivocally do not moderate content or accounts on the basis of race.”)

Michigan State’s Ronald Hall says he’s “extremely worried” about the impact on women of color in particular: “Women of color are constantly bombarded with these messages that you gotta be light in order to be attractive.”

Adawe, meanwhile, thinks the only solution is an all-out ban on filters that lighten faces. She says she has emailed Snapchat asking for just that. “Social media companies keep [creating] filters because the demand is so high,” she says. “But to me, I think they’re promoting colorism, whether they realize it and whether it’s intentional or not.” 

A spokesperson for Snap told MIT Technology Review, “Our goal is to build products that are fully inclusive of all Snapchatters, and we’ve put in place a number of processes and initiatives to help us do that. Our guidelines for all Snapchatters—which also apply to Lens submissions—prohibit discrimination and the promotion of stereotypes, and we have an extensive review process in place for Lenses, which includes testing them on a wide range of skin tones.” 

The company says it is partnering with experts for advice, and earlier this year it launched an initiative to build an “inclusive camera”, which is meant to be better at capturing a broader range of skin tones.

A completely different lens

Lise, who now lives in Minnesota, struggled with the effects of colorism for a long time. She went to therapy, watched endless YouTube tutorials on photo editing, and even bought a $600 camera that she hoped would make her look less dark in photos. Eventually she came to realize how harmful it had been.

“Now I just view everyone’s social media page with a completely different lens,” she says.

Today, she’s a new mom: when we spoke via Zoom, I was greeted by her cooing and wiggling baby. I was delighted, but Lise apologized profusely while she adjusted the lens. 

She says she wants to see more raw photos online that show beautiful women who look like her. She no longer edits her skin color in photos, and she tries hard to stop the negative thoughts in her head, though it can be hard. “Oh, I’ll be darned if I see someone saying anything to a beautiful dark-skinned woman,” she says. “I don’t care if it’s online, I don’t care if it’s in person—I’m going to call you out. I just can’t be quiet about it anymore, but it’s taken years. I’m going to be more conscious about what I’m teaching my son.”

from MIT Technology Review https://ift.tt/2VSqjPh via IFTTT

[your-dietician]

Bare Feet, Beer and Heavy Metal Bangers: Golf Chills Out and Gets Cool.

New Post has been published on https://tattlepress.com/golf/bare-feet-beer-and-heavy-metal-bangers-golf-chills-out-and-gets-cool/

Bare Feet, Beer and Heavy Metal Bangers: Golf Chills Out and Gets Cool.

Golf is one of the world’s oldest sports, with treasured traditions honed across several centuries. But increasingly over the last decade, many people have come to see golf as just plain old. And not in a good way.

The number of devoted recreational golfers in the United States has hovered at about 25 million, but the cohort is aging and more than 1,600 American golf courses closed in the 2010s. In 2004, and over the next 14 consecutive years, participation on courses waned.

These days, however, a fresh breeze is billowing through golf’s fusty clubhouse. It is not a stretch to call this movement the new golf. And new golf just might save old golf from itself.

It has helped power three successive years of participation growth that has reshaped the demographics of junior recreational golfers, who are now twice as likely to be female and four times as likely not to be white.

New golf has led to radically revised six- or 12-hole courses that reduce costs, land use and the time it takes to play a round. It has fostered a host of off-course experiences, including bustling entertainment venues that mix the vibe of a driving range and a sports bar, attracting a clientele with an average age of 31. It has meant golf courses with built-in sound systems playing music and with rounds in which no one keeps score — or cares to. Most conspicuously, in a sport in which 75 percent of the rounds are played on public golf courses, old-school protocol has been relaxed to stimulate a spirit of inclusion.

On a sunny evening this spring in northern Florida, Mike Miles, a 59-year-old former PGA Tour player who helped convert a failing conventional golf course into a quirky 12-hole public golf playground called The Yards, gazed out his window and noticed a young man on the first tee in bare feet.

“I’m thrilled to see him,” a smiling Miles said of the golfer, who was in his 20s and beginning a three-hole round known as the beer loop because it starts and ends next to the clubhouse bar. “We have to make golf not so serious.”

Top players agree.

“Whatever they want to do, they’re playing golf and that’s great,” said Jordan Spieth, who is 27 and has won three major championships. “I’ve got friends from high school and college, and they don’t keep their scores. They’re just going out to play music and have a few beers. They love it.”

Though such change might have been viewed as a threat to traditional golf 10 years ago, the sport’s leaders have now embraced relaxation.

“Offering more flavors of golf is tapping into evolutional demands,” Joe Beditz, the longtime president and chief executive of the National Golf Foundation, said. “It suits the predominant culture and is good for the game.”

Ashleigh McLaughlin, a former college golfer, is an executive with Youth on Course, a program that has subsidized more than one million rounds, bringing prices down to $5 or less. She said that conventional golf was being expanded, not replaced.

“Like most corners of the world, golf has had this kind of awakening when it relates to diversity and inclusion,” said McLaughlin, who is Black. “People can play golf in traditional ways, but there’s other ways to enjoy the game, whether you play barefoot, play music and don’t wear a polo shirt. There’s no judgment for that within the golf space.”

Like all uprisings, the sport’s mini-rebellion had a birthplace: Northern Virginia, where a golf entertainment company named Topgolf made its American debut in 2005. It has since swelled to 64 locations, the majority in or near urban areas. Topgolf facilities, which average more than 20 million customers annually, have the feel of a 1950s-style bowling alley set in a 21st century science fiction film.

While a Topgolf complex resembles a routine golf driving range, albeit one with multiple floors, it is meant to be a social experience. The goal is playful competition at each oversize driving bay, where a wait staff keeps customers plied with food and drink. Players choose from a full set of clubs to aim at targets of varying distances — from 50 to 250 yards — and sensors read a microchip embedded in each golf ball. Points are awarded according to how close the balls come to the targets and are displayed on large touch-screen monitors in each bay.

Laughter, not the imposing silence at a typical golf tee, is the prevalent soundtrack.

The secret to Topgolf’s booming popularity is a come-as-you-are atmosphere that has attracted people who don’t play the traditional game. Industry leaders once spurned Topgolf as “not real golf.” They now realize that Topgolf found a way to capitalize on a latent interest in the sport. (Television ratings for golf tournaments have been strong for decades even as it was understood that a large portion of the viewing audience did not play.)

“Topgolf took the friction out of the entry to golf and made it easy for people to satisfy their interest in the game without making a big investment,” said David Pillsbury, chief executive of ClubCorp, which owns or operates more than 200 golf clubs.

Pillsbury and his brethren in the golf community now view every Topgolf as a recruiting outpost, because industry studies have shown that a substantial number of first-time golfers got their start at a Topgolf or one of its many competitors, like Drive Shack, Big Shots and indoor simulators. The growing customer base at such sites is nearly 13 million and 45 percent female, according to the National Golf Foundation, and is increasingly drawn from more diverse and urban neighborhoods.

Next year, Topgolf, which recently merged with Callaway for $2 billion, will take a symbolically important step when it opens its first facility in partnership with an established, if flagging, nine-hole municipally owned golf course west of Los Angeles.

The course, in the coastal city of El Segundo, Calif., has been redesigned, and floodlights will be added for nighttime play. The property may become a model that proves that a modern golf entertainment venue can convert its customers into green-grass players.

The innovative spirit of the El Segundo project reflects a nationwide yearning for places to play that are unlike the stereotypical country club.

At Quicksands, a par-3 course positioned atop a stretch of sand dunes in Central Washington, the music of Metallica emanating from widely scattered speakers hints that a round will not follow tradition.

So might the advice that using a putter off the tee is the best option for the longest of Quicksands’s holes, which drops steeply downhill for 180 yards from tee to green. The entire layout, linked to the 18-hole Gamble Sands resort, can be traversed in 90 minutes with only a few clubs in hand.

A sign near the entrance sums up the vibe: Imagination on display.

Even Tiger Woods, sidelined by serious injuries sustained in a February car crash, is in on the alternative golf boom. He has become the co-owner of an expanding, technologically advanced chain of mini-golf courses. Each of Woods’s Popstroke putting courses, with multiple holes that incorporate bunkers and rough, offers food, craft beer, wine and ice cream that can be delivered to participants during play. There are two venues currently open in Florida, and this month Woods announced that his company would develop seven more courses, including sites in Texas and Arizona.

If Woods is the headliner in the experimentation category now overtaking recreational golf, Rob Collins, once a relative nobody, might now be the guru of the movement.

Seven years ago, Collins emptied his bank account to build an architecturally distinctive nine-hole course in eastern Tennessee, which was no one’s idea of a golf mecca. Collins did not have the money to build a clubhouse for his new course, called Sweetens Cove. Nor could he afford a bathroom. A portable toilet and a 20-foot-by-10-foot aluminum shed greeted golfers on opening day in 2014.

Business was slow, but another phenomenon — social media — helped spread the word of Sweetens Cove’s eccentric charm, which is a mix of playability and winsome challenges for golfers of all abilities. Influential golf websites like The Fried Egg and the popular Twitter account No Laying Up raved about Sweetens Cove’s unconventional allure and minimalist approach.

A cult attraction was born, as golfers from around the world happily made the pilgrimage into the Tennessee countryside 30 miles west of Chattanooga. Soon, Sweetens Cove was ranked among the top new American golf courses.

In March, when Sweetens Cove opened its online booking system for this year, it took 31 minutes for every available tee time Thursdays through Sundays from April 1 to Oct. 31 to sell out.

“We’ve become an international golf destination without the benefit of food and beverage, lodging or indoor plumbing,” Collins, 46, said with a laugh in May. “Led by younger generations, golf is refocusing. They crave compelling golf, and old assumptions about location, length and the configuration of the golf holes no longer apply.”

Collins and his design partner, Tad King, have become hot commodities with a slew of projects completed and planned.

“In those dark days around 2016, I never would’ve guessed that would happen,” Collins said. “But here we are.”

Buttressing the new golf movement has been a surge in the number of junior golfers who are flocking to restyled instruction programs. About 34 percent of junior golfers are now girls, compared with only 15 percent in 2000.

Jennifer Bermingham heads a step-by-step junior academy program called Crush It, which has been established at nearly 120 Club Corp courses from Virginia to California. Though the instruction is for boys and girls, Bermingham has girls learn in female-only groups.

“Girls like to work together and become friends and want to have a social element to the game and to practice,” said Bermingham, who is a certified P.G.A. and L.P.G.A. instructor. “There are always exceptions, but boys like to compete with each other and want to see who’s the winner. There’s a mentality that is just slightly different.”

New programs like Crush It have bolstered longstanding ones like The First Tee and Girls Golf, a partnership of the L.P.G.A. Foundation and the United States Golf Association that has taught the game to millions of young golfers in more than 2,000 locations.

According to data compiled last year by the National Golf Foundation, more than 25 percent of junior golfers are nonwhite, whereas just 6 percent of young golfers 21 years ago were.

Golf’s cultural revolution can be seen in every facet of the game, perhaps most noticeably in the relaxing of dress codes. Once demanding collared shirts, women’s skirts of a certain length and no hats turned backward, golf is chilling out.

Rules are being rewritten around the nation, most especially at the public courses that make up three-fourths of the sport’s inventory. To be sure, not every country club has altered its restrictions, but in many cases, only denim pants and tank tops are prohibited.

“Having to tuck in your shirt or turn your hat forwards, those things have to go away,” said Laura Scrivner, general manager of the Capital Canyon Club in Prescott, Ariz., which is operated by Troon, a worldwide golf management company. “There has to be a lighter touch now.”

Scrivner is particularly dedicated to rethinking golf’s protocols — she once ran a golf tournament called “Meet, Greet and Cheat,” which encouraged players to break every golf rule — and she has not let convention stand in the way at Capital Canyon, which is private.

JP Sipla, a 44-year-old member, is one of those golfers who plays his rounds barefoot. He calls himself a golf purist and plays to an enviable seven handicap, but his first question before joining Capital Canyon was whether he would be forced to wear shoes.

Assured there were no footwear regulations, he found himself on the club’s first tee not long afterward.

“There might have been someone cracking a joke about being barefoot, but it was lighthearted,” Sipla said in a telephone interview. “I’ve been here about a year now. Everyone knows me and they lovingly call me ‘Barefoot.’”

One of Sipla’s fellow members, Dave Dove, who is 89 and was introduced to golf by his father in the 1940s, welcomes the change he has seen in the game he still plays three times a week.

“You don’t want everybody to look the same and act the same,” Dove said. “That’s not what life is like. A golf course is a big place, there’s plenty of room for everybody. We’re just out there to have a good time.”

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[aman-acan-andacityplan]

Unicorns in Flight, Part 2

WeWork: or The Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn:

“When you call yourselves a technology company and when you actually build a social network to help further paint that picture, if no one uses it then you’re not a technology company.”

- Justin Zhen, Former WeWork Member

The newest movie on this list is Hulu’s documentary on WeWork. This documentary chronicles WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann and his co-working space company. As a concept, coworking is a decent idea. For small startups, a coworking office offers flexible, small spaces and a wide variety of shared infrastructure and amenities to facilitate information exchange and networking. Its a good idea, but one that quickly morphs into a bloated octopus of other ventures such as WeLive and and WeGrow. While Fyre and Theranos might be classified as frauds from the start, the tragedy of WeWork and Loot Crate, which I detail below, is that they are companies that could have had a modest, but long-term, base of success if they kept things simple and didn’t expand too quickly.

Another quality of WeWork and Loot Crate I’d like to mention is that they were kind of chameleons. I say that because WeWork and Loot Crate were not really tech companies. One can acknowledge that WeWork and Loot Crate leveraged social media and consumer analytics to cater to their consumer’s needs in a way that simply wasn’t possible over a decade ago. However, a savvy social media profile and cutting-edge consumer analytics are things most large companies engage in now to stay competitive in a fast-moving market. Couple that with a lack of transparency at the highest levels of management and you have a company destined to fail. One common trait of these failed unicorns is the belief that innovation trumps traditional communication and information exchange. The lack of basic communication in these stories is rather shocking and despite boasting about social media savvy and their responsiveness to new ideas, these companies could not comprehend the big picture in the slightest. In the case of WeWork, little was known about how the company overvalued its properties or that it was increasingly investing too much money in the acquisition and rehabilitation of newly acquired properties.      

In short, a novel idea or approach is not enough to keep a company viable, especially when the big fish can become savvy to your model and integrate it into their operations. Unfortunately, the corporate culture of WeWork was too invested in maintaining its coveted Unicorn status that it forgot to keep its eye on property management and maintaining WeWork as a key fixture in the new industry of coworking.

Loot Crate Video:

The last one on this list is not a documentary film, but I think it fits since it is a simple concept ludicrously stretched out of shape. While I’ll acknowledge that Loot Crates were never my thing, I believe that there is a kernel of a good business idea there. The only problem is the idea was never one destined for corporate greatness and once the concept got too big it quickly fell under the weight of its own ambitions, as the company declared bankruptcy in 2019. Today the company continues to exist in name only as it was acquired by collectibles manufacturer NECA.

The story of Loot Crate isn’t quite the “rags to riches to ruins” story of the other three cited here, but it is yet another example of how the speed of Silicon Valley is a detriment to small and mid-sized businesses. For example, using Youtube unboxing videos as a way to promote new products was a novel advertising concept and helped build the brand. However, if your company’s product line is getting stretched and you are unable to meet the expectations of your customers, then brand building becomes a useless and counter-productive exercise. As the quality of the crates fell it should come as no surprise that many Youtubers turned on the company. A company shouldn’t expect a lot of strong brand loyalty when the most you have to offer is a few cheap trinkets and the occasional Funko Pop.

In this case, the “move fast and break things” mindset of Silicon Valley startups was probably not the way to go for a company dabbling in what were essentially cheap toys. Had Loot Crate opted for a more conservative approach, it could have used its box profits to branch out into small-scale toy production of its own, highly specialized geek products to compliment its already existing box business. Now that Loot Crate has been acquired by NECA, it appears that Loot Crate is going in that exact direction, though time will tell whether the diminished brand has any pull in the overcrowded geek merchandise market anymore. Had Loot Crate played its cards right, it could have been at the head of a small, but emerging, market sector. As it stands now though, Loot Crate is a hollowed-out brand, another generic crate company among a raft of other crate companies.   

Final Thoughts:

The kind of unbridled optimism that seemed so prevalent in the late 2000′s has essentially dried up in 2021. By the end of the 2010′s, the public’s perception of the world of high tech seemed less and less about product innovation and mundane business practices like applied research and quality control and more about selling an experience or corporate ethos.

This is especially true in the case of Fyre, but I would argue all of these docs are about companies who sold an experience or feeling of belonging above all else. WeWork was not simply a real estate company, it was changing the face of community. Loot Crate was not simply a specialty crate company, it was a curated experience by and for nerds. Theranos was not simply a medical testing company, it was a strong, private advocate for better health outcomes. In all these cases, the more mundane qualities of managing a company were replaced by airy nostrums about innovation or changing the face of *insert business sector here*. These vapid assurances were then combined with the “move fast and break things” mindset of Silicon Valley, which ensured that any probing questions about company performance were quickly dispatched in favor of hitting the next big goal or endeavor.

While some degree of corruption is to be expected in every generation, the failure of these tech unicorns strikes me as different in a few meaningful ways. A lot of corruption tends to prey on naive and marginalized people in society. A company like Stratton Oakmont selling penny stocks to the little guy or a Televangelist bilking money from his loyal audience are scams tailor made for those who feel excluded from the larger culture. By comparison, the tech startup scandals of the 2010′s seemed to target and prey upon the hopes and aspirations of the elite. 

With the passing of Steve Jobs in 2011, America was searching far and wide for the next great American industrialist, someone who could make our lives easier and restore faith in the technocratic order. Fast forward 10 years later and the belief in “better living through technology” is in tatters and the future looks brighter only for a select few or it will occur in some soil far removed from Silicon Valley’s tech titans. In summation, I believe these documentaries signify more than bad management and executive incompetence, they signify the end of the modern dream and of the belief that human ingenuity will be enough to keep society moving forward.   

[floridaprelaw-blog]

Education Defeats Ignorance, Ambushing Amplifies It: We Are All In This Together

By Matthew Ginsberg, University of South Florida, Class of 2021

June 23, 2020

Between racially targeted attacks against African Americans being shown on every news network, a global pandemic taking the lives of nearly 500,000 people worldwide, and the effects of police brutality taking center stage, many people have chosen to ambush ignorance. But the greatest gift we have in a democratic society is the power to evoke education by using our words as teaching tools, not as weapons of mass destruction. Trapped in a world of hate, the desire to be right has tarnished the beauty of differences in views, beliefs, and perspectives, making many citizens hesitant and fearful to speak about the way they perceive prevalent issues in modern society. Learning cannot transpire when perpetrators of ignorance feel under threat; there is no potential for progress. To teach is to understand that it is not what you say, but your approach in how you say it. The freedom of the first amendment allows all citizens “the freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to peacefully assemble, and to petition the government.” But,between the “fake news” causing citizens to question the legitimacy of news stories, constant ridicule over mere disagreement, and shaming those because they are “in the wrong,” it’s no wonder people are more reluctant now than ever before to speak freely.

Racial injustice has plagued the United States and many countries around the world since slavery began in the 17th century. To say that members of the black community have been prime targets of inexcusable action by racist white citizens and police officers, who fail to honor their oath of integrity to the community and the law, would be a clear understatement. People of all races and ethnicities are fed up with the bigotry and violence against victims that did not deserve to die over committing petty crimes, and in many cases, victims who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But, unfortunately, oppression against the black community is not anything new. African Americans have been and continue to be discriminated against in the job market, by residential segregation, and in nearly every category of life. What is new, however, is technological innovation creating a platform that allows all citizens the opportunity to videotape and upload acts of racial injustice and unnecessary violence when they witness cruel and unwarranted barbarity. The ability for one post to go viral in a matter of hours is a huge advantage in spreading awareness. Between recent cases like George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylorto name a few, the news media eagerly awaits any opportunity to shame acts of betrayal by police officers and ordinary citizens trying to manipulate the system. All people need to be held accountable for their actions, regardless of their race or uniform, but awaiting an opportunity to attack ignorance will not solve the problem at hand. The ability all citizens have to empower through advocating education, not by fighting fire with fire, is what creates the greatest opportunity to maximize learning and growth potential. Big brother has caught up and everyone’s actions are being monitored, reiterating the importance of accountability. Living in a world with nearly 7.8 billion people, racial and cultural diversity makes this country and this world a place with ample opportunity to educate beyond preconceived perception. Adjudicating physical appearance over the content of character is what keeps racially targeted attacks fresh in the news. But hostility is not the answer; empowermentis.

Social media came to fruition in 1997 with the creation of Six Degrees, a networking platform created to bring users closer together via instant messaging. After reaching 3,500,000 registered users at its peak, the company was sold for $125 million, before going out of business in 2001. Although Six Degrees was not technologically advanced enough to maintain a following and establish profitability, obtaining millions of users within three years of launching signified that the world was ready for platforms that encourage interconnectivity. The failure of Six Degrees exacerbated a movement that young entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Kevin Systrom took full advantage of. By February 2004, Mr. Zuckerberg launched Facebook with a mission to “give people the power to build a community and bring the world closer together.” Since launching 16 years ago, over 2.6 billion people have become active users, which is over 7 times the population of the United States. In March 2006, Mr. Dorsey launched Twitter with the goal of “giving everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” Since Twitter’s official launch, they have attracted over 330 million active users, which is more total users than the United States has in citizens. In October2010, Mr. Systrom launched Instagram, hoping to “allow users to instantly capture and share the world's most precious moments.” 10 years later, Instagram has generated 1 billion monthly active users, which equates to over 3 times the population of the United States. Although many people have multiple social networking accounts, a study done by the Statistica Research Group in 2019 found that an estimated 3.2 billion people around the world have at least one social media account. To put that number into perspective, nearly half of the world population has at least one social media account. The significance of social media globally taking off is that people all around the world have the ability to raise awareness about widespread issues, making it easier than ever before to influence politicians and create change that embraces equality. Unfortunately, social media has become a danger zone for many people, who get bombarded by ridicule for taking advantage of their first amendment rights. To neglect hate speech and bigoted rhetoric is to accept racism, but the manner in which we, as a society, approach ignorance is critical in helping to create a country that welcomes people of all races, genders, and ethnicities with open arms. To move forward is not to terrorize ignorance, as ignorance is a teaching opportunity, not a justification to humiliate a lack of understanding. 

The United States is the hegemonic power that all countries pay close attention to. Since George Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020, nearly every state in the country has experienced mass protests from advocates of the “Black Lives Matter” movement demanding that new legislation get implemented to ensure the rights of black citizens are protected. People are fed up with sitting on the sidelines, awaiting the next breaking news headline of a murder that could have been avoided. Butsince mass protests erupted around the country less than a month ago, other countries like England, France, Australia, and New Zealand have experienced mass protests of their own, due to racism and police brutality. The issues that haunt modern day America are not just domestic issues, but rather global issues. Living in the country with the most influence in the international arena, we as American citizens have a responsibility to continue the movement and act as role models, to ensure that we are doing our part in making the world not only tolerant, but accepting of all people.

White privilege is best understood observing people in positions of power. According to the United States Census Bureau, 75% of judges are white and 80% of law enforcement is white. White men make up 33% of the population, but 97% of Republican politicians and 80% of Democratic politicians are white. See the problem? Society is set up to ensure that white people remain in positions of power, which is the exact reason why it took the creation of social media and video on cell phones to bring racism to the forefront of America. With only 12% of members in the House of Representatives and 3% of Senators being African American, Congress needs more black representatives to ensure the 14th amendment, which guarantees all citizens the equal protection of the law, is honored and enforced. Citizens are infuriated and they have every right to be. But the way we create change is through working together in unison, helping those that have not spent enough time educating themselves, acting as allies, not enemies. With platforms like Google and various news networks, we can all do our part in researching major issues and becoming advocates of change, so that future generations never have to experience the violence and bigotry that the generations before them have undergone. For Democrats to turn on CNN or Republicans to turn on FOX only exacerbates division among citizens; people need to move away from their biased news media and transition toward observing issues from both sides of the spectrum. Our Founding Fathers gave citizens freedom of speech to ensure that all voices are heard, respected, and accounted for. It is time for all Americans to learn to accept one another, teach one another, and empower one another by educating themselves to the fullest extent possible. This is not a movement. It is the beginning of a new way of life, but only if we create it to be. We are all on the same team, it is time we start acting like it.

________________________________________________________________

Akhtar, Allana. “A World on Fire: Here Are All the Major Protests Happening around the Globe Right Now.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 4 June 2020, www.businessinsider.com/all-the-protests-around-the-world-right-now.

Blake, John. “George Floyd. Ahmaud Arbery. Breonna Taylor. What Can Black Parents Possibly Tell Their Kids Now About Staying Safe?” CNN, Cable News Network, 29 May 2020, www.cnn.com/2020/05/29/us/black-parents-children-safety-talk-blake/index.html.

Bureau, US Census. “About Race.” The United States Census Bureau, 22 Apr. 2020, www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html.

Clement, J. “Facebook: Active Users Worldwide.” Statista, 30 Apr. 2020, www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/.

Clement, J. “Twitter: Number of Active Users 2010-2019.” Statista, 14 Aug. 2019, www.statista.com/statistics/282087/number-of-monthly-active-twitter-users/.

Clement, J. “Instagram: Active Users Worldwide.” Statista, 3 Dec. 2019, www.statista.com/statistics/253577/number-of-monthly-active-instagram-users/.

Conley, Zachary. “Current World Population.” Worldometer, 20 Apr. 2020, www.worldometers.info/world-population/.

Crystal, Tammi. “The Complete History of Instagram.” WeRSM, 12 May 2015, www.wersm.com/the-complete-history-of-instagram/.

“Facebook Launches.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 24 Oct. 2019, www.history.com/this-day-in-history/facebook-launches-mark-zuckerberg.

Groth, Leah. “Here's Exactly How Many Cases of Coronavirus There Are Worldwide Right Now.” Health.com, 25 May 2020, www.health.com/condition/infectious-diseases/how-many-cases-of-coronavirus-worldwide.

Hill, Evan, et al. “8 Minutes and 46 Seconds: How George Floyd Was Killed in Police Custody.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 1 June 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html.

History.com Editors. “First Amendment.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 4 Dec. 2017, www.history.com/topics/united-states-constitution/first-amendment.

History.com Editors. “Slavery in America.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 12 Nov. 2009, www.history.com/topics/black-history/slavery.

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Photo Credit: https://www.army.mil/article/219773/law_day_2019_encourages_learning_about_first_amendment_rights

https://vpdiversity.virginia.edu/statement-regarding-death-george-floyd-ahmaud-arbery-breonna-taylor-and-so-many-others

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https://theflagshirt.com/blogs/news/we-re-all-in-this-togethe

“Twitter Launches.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 28 June 2019, www.history.com/this-day-in-history/twitter-launches.

Williams, Henry. “Despite Diverse Demographics, Most Politicians Are Still White Men.” U.S. News & World Report, U.S. News & World Report, 18 Nov. 2018, www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2017-10-24/despite-diverse-demographics-most-politicians-are-still-white-men.

Zimmerman, Arthur. “What Is a Police Officer's Oath of Office?” Reference, IAC Publishing, 16 Apr. 2016, www.reference.com/world-view/police-officer-s-oath-office-63e290618d12ef93.

[sockparade]

ill at ease

I can still picture the grin on Milan’s face that day as he walked into the office with a Starbucks frappuccino in hand. I have a hard time remembering a day when Milan didn’t arrive at the office with a Starbucks frappuccino in hand. So it wasn’t out of the ordinary. But it was noteworthy that day because the week before a video went viral of two Black men being arrested at a Starbucks in Philadelphia because a white employee was uncomfortable with them asking to use the restroom and sitting in the coffeeshop while they waited for a business associate to arrive. Something non-Black folks do all the time. People were calling for a total Starbucks boycott.

I raised my eyebrows at his drink, and he shrugged saying, “Look, I’m not going to let the actions of some racist white people take away my freedom to get whatever drink I want.” 

And like, yeah, I objectively understand how that’s an imperfect political stance and maybe an ineffective strategy to create change, but also, man, I really felt that. In order to protest Black men being arrested for sitting in a coffeeshop (read: for being Black), was I really going to try to tell a Black man about where he should or shouldn’t get his substandard (ha) coffee fix? Try to convince him about the importance of voting with his dollar? Can’t a person just live?   

I just didn’t have it in me to disagree. 

I often think about that exchange whenever I hear a call to boycott such and such corporation or a call to cancel a celebrity. I mean, listen, I do believe in the power of an organized boycott or protest. There is concrete historical evidence and contemporary examples of how people have bossed companies and the government into doing what we demand. But I don’t want to keep pretending that it’s an easy switch to flip or that it’s a cost-free way for people of color to fight against the inequity in the world.  

That Starbucks incident was just one in an endless number of incidents in which a white person says or does something that reveals their racism, forcing people of color to do the emotionally taxing, unending math, of just how much caucasity we’re willing to stomach.

This is a really old story. Marginalized groups of people have always had to bear the brunt of publicized racist behavior. For every racist incident, there are generally three major phases of emotional labor that people of color in the United States have to work through. At first I could only name two but then I realized it’s actually three. Let me walk you through them.

First, before any explicitly racist incident happens, we have to contend with the fact that there are generally such slim pickings in terms of choices that will allow us to exist ethically and stay true to our convictions. How do we earn a living? Where do we grocery shop? What authors do we read? Whose music do we listen to? Are there ANY electronics that are manufactured in an ethical way? Do we wear checks or not? Are the non-white teachers at this preschool treated with respect by the white owners of this preschool? How do I reduce my purchases on Amazon? Is this restaurant gentrifying the neighborhood? Wait which banks have divested from fossil fuels again? Can I truly be myself at this church? What athleisure brands haven’t been accused of overt racism yet? Where are the influencers that look like me? 

When it comes to the consumption of and participation in… well, almost anything, we constantly have to make concessions because we live in a place that’s simply not built for us. It is so hard to name a single sphere of life that I enjoy that isn’t dominated by whiteness or the white gaze. I think my MO for some time now has been to assume that no brand, company, restaurant, actor, or celeb is truly *safe*. I’m generally always waiting for the other shoe to drop while also trying not to think about it too much. It’s a lot of mental gymnastics. 

I was at a lecture a few years ago on the topic of the “doctrine of discovery” and the systematic oppression of Native American nations. It was a large auditorium in Berkeley full of neoliberal mostly white folks. The lecturer read a rather dismissive opinion rejecting the Oneidas attempt to reclaim land that was criminally stolen from them in violation of U.S. treaty (Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation, 2005) as a shockingly recent example of how this oppression has continued. And then theatrically, he revealed the author to be none other than Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. There was a loud, audible, collective gasp from the audience. 

I mean, no, I didn’t know the Notorious RBG had that in her. But also, I’m not over here clutching my pearls. I’m not saying I’m proud of my jaded mentality. I’m just accustomed to it. As Tressie McMillan Cottom says in her essay “Know Your Whites” in Thick: And Other Essays, “I am not disappointed. If you truly know your whites, disappointment rarely darkens your door.” I’ve been seeing more and more of this language with the virality and frequency of racist actions being caught on video and circulated on the internet. People will say, “I’m not surprised, but I’m mad.” It’s too overwhelming to feel shock and pain every single time. So we steady ourselves for the eventuality, we brace for the pain. Know your whites, y’all.        

The second phase of emotional labor is related to the actual injury. We feel the deep pain of injury even if we don’t know the person that was harmed or the person who caused the harm. I think people are sometimes quick to dismiss the behavior of rich and famous people as irrelevant and reduce discussion of it as simply celebrity gossip. But I think there’s pain whether it’s a murder, an arrest, or a racial slur. I know it can be hard to tell by the overwhelming amount of white tears shed on social media after each viral incident but the marginalized group targeted by the offense carries the pain so differently than anyone outside of that group. Try as we might to muster our empathy and our vague-ass Christian lament, it’s just. not. the. same. It’s not. Sometimes it’s so painful that I don’t even fully let myself go there. I haven’t been able to bring myself to read in detail about the recent hate crimes against Asians since COVID-19. I feel squeamish about it. I feel pain when I read stories and see pictures of families being separated, detained and deported but I know for a Latinx person that pain must be so much deeper. And I absolutely cannot fully imagine the pain that Black and Indigineous folks in America endure living in this place.  

And then finally, there’s the third phase of labor. This is the part when we’re called upon to react, call it out, bring awareness, advocate for change, and make swift changes (big and small) in our own lives. Sometimes I feel judged (by others and by my own conscience) when I don’t boycott or abstain. And sometimes I just try to skip to this third phase because I don’t want to deal with the grief of the second phase. 

After this past week’s twitter feud, lots of folks are ready to cancel Alison Roman for the trash comments she made about Chrissy Teigan and Marie Kondo in her recent interview in The New Consumer. It feels like there’s a sudden clamoring to point out just how white Alison Roman is, and how there’s new evidence that she’s racist. And I guess what I want to say is, um, it’s not really much of a reveal nor is it brand new information. Right? Roxana Hadadi in her recent article titled, “Alison Roman, the Colonization of Spices, and the Exhausting Prevalence of Ethnic Erasure in Popular Food Culture” gives a pretty detailed explanation of just how unshocking it is. 

Prior to reading this interview in The New Consumer, did anyone really think Alison Roman had an astute analysis of her white privilege and her accompanying habit of cultural appropriation that she’s benefitted from her entire career? No! While certainly gross, was I shocked that she mocked imperfect English (regardless of whether it was in reference to Marie’s accent or a Eastern European cookbook)? No! Am I shocked when any person mocks an accent? No! We’ve *allowed* it in TV shows, in movies, in corporate settings, and in social settings. I cringe every time but I’ve been forced my whole life to accommodate it. I’ve heard mockery of accents maybe most often from second generation immigrants mocking their own culture’s accents! And If I’m completely honest, I still sometimes find myself guilty of laughing along. (Curiously, Alison Roman’s lengthy apology made no mention of that part of her interview. Perhaps she, and/or her PR team, realized there was no easy way to walk that one back.) Race relations are a fucking mess in our country, y’all. Let’s please stop pretending like it’s just the occasional ultra-public celebrity slip-up. 

Hear me when I say I’m not defending her fuckery. What I’m taking issue with is the lack of nuance and the self-righteousness in how we respond to these public brouhahas. Both the shocked reactions and the gotcha reactions expressed by people feel equally tiresome to me. This reflection, written by Charlotte Muru-Lanning, is one of the few three-dimensional, unflattened, and self-searching reflections written by a person of color on this whole drama. While I don’t agree with how defensive she is of Alison Roman, I appreciate the way she refuses to act as if she doesn’t exist in the world that she’s critiquing and I love that she recognizes the complexity in herself as a woman of color. 

I’ve become pretty comfortable in my understanding that everyone white in our country is racist. I say racist in the fullest, most comprehensive definition of the word. Some are hateful in their racism. And some are actively trying to fight it even as it exists in themselves. As Ijeoma Oluo explains so succinctly and precisely in her book, So You Want to Talk About Race, racism is “a prejudice against someone based on race, when those prejudices are reinforced by systems of power.” And then she goes on to say, “Systematic racism is a machine that runs whether we pull the levers or not, and by just letting it be, we are responsible for what it produces. We have to actually dismantle the machine if we want to make change.” It’s in the water. And we are all impacted by it, no matter what part of the machine we’re in. Me included. As a Taiwanese American who grew up in Houston, Texas, I wasn’t magically immune to the anti-blackness that was/is prevalent in the Asian American community. Whether it was comments made by my parents, my relatives, my friends, or comments from acquaintances/strangers, it was pretty consistent. You don’t bake in that environment for all your formative years without it damaging a part of you. It’s something I still find myself fighting to unroot and discard from my psychology and my bias despite spending my non-profit career trying to address racial disparities in education and employment. I might spend the rest of my life working on it. We can’t keep pretending it’s an occasional affliction or it’s a disease that only Trump supporters suffer from. I suspect the people who are *shocked* at Alison Roman’s racist comments are also people who believe there are good whites and bad whites. #notallwhites? 

Lots of folks have written reflections on cancel culture so I don’t feel the need to rehash it all here. Cancel culture exists for a reason. And it also has its various pitfalls. On one of my favorite podcasts, Still Processing, Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris do an excellent job of examining the limits of cancel culture in their episode about Michael Jackson (content warning: child sexual abuse). One of their most compelling arguments against cancel culture is that while it attempts to hold an individual accountable, it can also be harmful because it allows people to look away. It allows us to skip the hard work of scrutinizing our broken systems beyond a single individual and it allows us to give ourselves a pass and not search ourselves for the ways in which we are complicit. We can’t look away. We have to interrogate what we consume and why. It’s the only way things will change.

I want to attempt to do some of that hard work here. Beyond organized boycotts, I do subscribe to the idea that there’s value in the individual choices I make to abstain from something. Not just in service of a desired economic, political or societal outcome, but because of the impact it can have on me, as an individual. So let me push past my annoyance that I even have to do this when I’ve already done two other phases of emotional labor and get to work. 

A question I’ve been asking myself this week is: Did I somehow make peace with Alison Roman’s cultural appropriation for profit? And if so, why? The answer is, yeah, I think I did. And here are my thoughts on why.

I like Alison Roman’s recipes. I have both of her cookbooks and I only have three cookbooks in my kitchen so that’s something. It’s pretty rare for me to crack open a cookbook when I’m in the kitchen. I mostly just google for specific recipes I’m craving or I’ll look up what temperature is ideal for roasting cauliflower. Almost all the dinners I cook for my family consist of rice/noodles, a meat, and a vegetable and I don’t use recipes for those anymore. Each week I do like to have one “more complicated” dinner recipe and that’s when I’ll sometimes open a cookbook or scroll Instagram. I spend an unreasonable amount of time reading recipe comments (often contradicting) about modifications or adjustments they made and that’s after wading past all the comments about how excited people are to make the posted recipe-- it’s all very confusing and time consuming. 

For someone who was not taught how to cook and who didn’t spend much time in a kitchen until maybe 3 years ago, I appreciated Alison Roman’s insistence that she had figured out the “best way” to make classic dishes (usually dishes I did not grow up eating, like Shrimp Louie or Shallot Pasta), the way she suggested using spices I’ve never cooked or eaten before (Aleppo pepper), and her encouragement to use new techniques that I was unfamiliar with (slow roasting tomatoes in the oven for six hours). It was kind of like finding a cooking lifehack.  

While I found her IG persona mostly grating and self-congratulatory, I was charmed by her vision in her first cookbook for lowering the barrier to entry for making a really great meal that you can be proud of and her push in her second cookbook to host dinner parties that bring your friends together in a memorable way. For a generation that has relished mostly eating out all the time and then ordering in all the time, following an Alison Roman recipe could sometimes feel like permission to try shit out in the kitchen without the pressure to be a master at it. It was a good feeling when the recipes turned out well and it was fun to talk about which recipes I’d tried with other folks who were also working their way through her recipes. 

Okay, and this part might sound ridiculous but I sort of thought that Alison Roman was someone who could maybe teach me how to make white food. Haha. You know what I’m talking about? Like the food that might be on a menu at a restaurant tagged as “American (New)” on Yelp. I mean yes, she has a recipe for “Kimchi-Braised Pork with Sesame and Egg Yolk” in Nothing Fancy but that kind of bastardized Asian dish has been popping up on white restaurant menus pretty consistently for some time now. But a question I’m now asking myself is why I wanted to make white food in the first place? Did I subconsciously think it was fancier and would make for a more interesting menu when hosting dinner parties? 

In her introduction to that Kimchi-Braised Pork recipe she says, “I am calling this a braise, but it is really a stew (an homage to the Korean Jigae) in which meat is braised--but isn’t that most stews?” How do you react when you read that sentence? I think she avoids triggering my usual alarm bells because she doesn’t attempt to be an expert in Korean cuisine. She feints left by throwing in the homage line. She’s not aiming for authenticity in her recipe. It might actually be worse if she gave a mini lecture on Korean cuisine. I don’t know. When I read that line in the cookbook, I don’t find myself immediately questioning the proper origins of the recipe. I don’t have the same knee jerk reaction as when a white chef publishes a whole cookbook of recipes from just one specific region of the world and presumes to be the expert or the ultimate curator. 

And maybe that’s the problem. Maybe I need to work harder to stay in the habit of questioning recipe creation and curation. Kind of like the way I’ve learned to question books like Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt. Fifteen years ago I wouldn’t have thought twice about white authors writing the stories of people of color. Wasn’t that the whole of literature? Or so I thought. What a gift it’s been to pivot my reading to mostly authors of color! What would happen if I demanded more from the food media I was consuming?

It gets a bit more complicated for me though. Alison Roman has a Chinese-inspired recipe called “Soy-Braised Brisket with Caramelized Honey and Garlic” that I really like. In her introduction to it she writes, “... the tangy, spiced braised beef noodles available at a few of my favorite Chinese restaurants around New York, which I’ll order every time. While not a replication, this brisket is my interpretation: salty from soy sauce, sour from vinegar, lightly spiced from a few pantry all-stars.”  

I don’t even know where to start with this one. I am personally so confused by Chinese food. What is Chinese food? What is Taiwanese food? What is Americanized Chinese food? Is that still Chinese food? What was the food my mom cooked at home throughout my childhood? It took me awhile to allow myself to just fully enjoy Americanized Chinese food without feeling hung up about it. A few years ago my mom made a new dish that I loved and I naively asked her whether it was a recipe she grew up with. I think I was secretly hoping it was a family recipe that she learned from her mom so I could check that immigrant kid fantasy off my list.

She laughed and said, “Do you know where I learned it from? I learned it on YouTube!”

I mean, this is the thing with the Asian Diaspora. Things are pretty disjointed for me. I know some Asian Americans are super locked in and schooled on their origins, heritage, and culture but I honestly don’t know much. I don’t know what region or city in Taiwan my favorite kind of Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup is from. I think I’ve learned to make a version of it that I like better than anything I’ve ever eaten in a restaurant or in someone’s home. I don’t say that to brag, I just say that to point out how confusing it is to try to connect that Taiwanese dish with my heritage when it’s something I learned how to make in my thirties using a recipe I found on a stranger’s website. I feel like I’m trying to connect with a culture I didn’t really grow up in myself. I’m chasing phantoms. 

You know what, I feel like some white lady in the Midwest on the Instant Pot Community Facebook group might legitimately be the world expert on the best way to make General Tso’s Chicken in a pressure cooker at home. After I made the Butter Chicken recipe from Two Sleevers, I looked up who authored the recipe and was so relieved to see that Dr. Urvashi (affectionately nicknamed The Butter Chicken Lady) was Indian. I loved that Butter Chicken recipe. I was super excited to try cooking more Indian food and I was happy that I could do it with a clear conscience. Haha, it’s all so convoluted, I know. 

I think maybe I feel reluctant to hold others accountable for being more respectful of food origins because my understanding of my own cultural heritage (as it relates to food, but also in many other ways) feels spotty and incomplete. I find myself feeling unsure of what I am defending. But ultimately I think this has been a flimsy excuse. It’s not so hard to google a bit more to find a chef that’s sharing a recipe from their particular culture. I think I need to confront the hidden grief I feel about being disconnected from my culture. 

In The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief, Anne Anlin Cheng puts it this way, 

“If the move from grief to grievance, for example, aims to provide previously denied agency, then it stands as a double-edged solution, since to play the plaintiff is to cultivate, for many critics, a cult of victimization. So the gesture of granting agency through grievance confers agency on the one hand and rescinds it on the other. As a result, for many concerned with improving the conditions of marginalized peoples, the focus on psychical injury and its griefs is strategically harmful and to be studiously avoided. But this also means that we are so worried about depriving disenfranchised people of their agency that we risk depriving them of the time and space to grieve. A final problem is that since justice based on grievance and compensation tends to rely on the logic of commensurability and quantifiability, it is ill-equipped to confront that which is incommensurable and unquantifiable. In short, we as a society are at ease with the discourse of grievance but terribly ill at ease in the face of grief.” 

So yeah, I guess the part I haven’t said is, when I read those comments made by Alison Roman in that interview, it hurt me. And when she deflected and didn’t take the initial pushback seriously, that hurt too. It was such a familiar feeling. I know that feeling because I’ve been there before. I’ve had my feelings brushed off with a laugh or a weird, unsatisfactory explanation. I’ve been told that someone was just punching up and didn’t think about it in the context I was. I’ve experienced that basic othering so many times in my life.

Okay so the theory here is that if I do a better job of facing the first and second phase of emotional labor head on… if I can somehow process the pain and grief of living in a racist society, then being a thoughtful consumer will feel less like a sacrifice. It’ll be easier for me to stand by choices I’ve made because I’ll know I’ve made them with integrity and in a way that is true to myself. And I can get to a place where that doesn’t feel like a loss of freedom but rather a true liberation. Man, I want that. 

I also want to get in the habit of asking myself whether my desires, the same desires I am so reluctant to give up, are not actually just byproducts themselves of suffering in this machine for so long. Like, do I really believe it’s coincidental that I bought into Alison Roman’s brand and that I also do a good amount of my shopping at Madewell? And then they happened to do a collab together? 

I need take a magnifying glass to the way I’ve been subconsciously trained to prize dominant white culture. It is so uncomfortable for me to even type that out because it feels like I’m admitting that I like white culture. Like I’m somehow admitting to an inferiority complex. I’m not saying I wish I were white. I definitely don’t wish that. But I am guilty of believing that my taste, my style, and my preferences are somehow invincible to the whiteness of million dollar marketing campaigns in this country. I like to pretend that my brain is somehow impervious to the terrifying industry of engineered social media algorithms and psychological branding strategies. And that’s bullshit. I don’t think anyone really wants to be white these days. Even white people themselves seem uncomfortable. But a white person enjoying wonderful things created by people of color? We eat that shit up. Why do we do that?

We have to spend time recognizing, no matter the discomfort, why our pleasures align so easily with the dominant culture. My hope is that when I start interrogating the way my tastes align with whiteness I’ll begin to cherish the ability I have to move into a place of misalignment. Maybe it won’t be so difficult to give up things I’ve taken pleasure in, because I’ll find pleasure in the process of detaching. Maybe it’ll eventually stop feeling like I’m abstaining and it’ll feel more like I’m just making powerful choices. 

I think the shallow analysis of white supremacy and consumption in this country instructs a person of color to believe that liberation means having the freedom to consume as we please, disregarding the impact of our choices. You know, a chance to live the way many white people live. But I think a more thoughtful analysis instructs us to believe that our choices have consequences in terms of whether it supports or dismantles the machine of racism -- both in ourselves and in society. 

Instead of the performative handwringing of trying to decide whether or not we buy another Starbucks coffee, hit next when MJ starts playing on a Spotify playlist, or keep cooking that Alison Roman brisket, my friend Milan has taught me over the years that it’s more important to be attentive to what we are desiring and why we’re making the choices that we make. Yeah that will often mean boycotting things or making different choices, no doubt. The difference is that it won’t be from an exhausting place of trying to achieve blameless optics. It’ll be from a genuine realignment. There’s freedom in that.          

And yes, I see it too. That our pleasure and the way we experience culture is so closely tied to consumption is fodder for a whole other damn essay. Ugh.     

[simplicituniverse]

There is no such thing as Racial Hypersensitivity!

As a black female and alumna of a predominantly white liberal arts college, I have always been aware of my racial standing in this country. With that awareness comes the awareness of others' awareness of their own racial standing in this country. What I mean by that is this; I have and will never not know how blacks are perceived in American society. And despite the modern fad of being "woke", I am still a small elephant in a big jungle of other blacks who seem to think that although we have not reached the top, we have come a long way in this country when it comes to racism. Now that the bathrooms are no longer color coded, we can let white people breathe for once. By all means, let's just be normal. Slavery has ended, we've had a black president, more ethnic politicians fill state government positions than ever in history, oh and don't forget, marijuana is being legalized in a new state every five minutes. This country may as well be an average negroes paradise, right? Wrong. All jokes and cynic sarcasm aside, yes, blatant racism is no longer as prevalent as it was 70 years ago and the excellence of Africans and African Americans today have superseded anything someone living in 1959 Montgomery, Alabama could have ever imagined.  In fact, I think it is safe to say racism in itself has vanished, but unfortunately only to transform itself into what is known as degrading inclusion, i.e All Lives Matter and a comfortability in being culturally uneducated. Prejudices no longer apply to just black people. Discrimination is both cross racial, cross spiritual, cross financial, hell cross anything that doesn't identify with W.A.S.P.  Equality is actually being taken literally, just not in our favor. We have made such an attempt at heating up the melting pot that white people are now comfortable with saying things that would have gotten blacks killed decades ago. What is worse is that, the Blacks in America who can actually see this transformation are considered "racially hypersensitive", that meaning, to us, everything is about race, all white people are out to get us, the revolution must be televised, etc, etc.  I know this is a lot to take in, but stay with me. A few days ago at work, my boss made a joke about how often I accidentally email the wrong people based on which region of the company they are in charge of.  He turned to me and said "Shay they're going to hang you if you keep sending them things that go to Wes". I hope by now you have already concluded that yes, my boss is a middle aged white man, and yes, his choice of words could not have been any worse. I, being the sophisticated and money needing graduate that I am, laughed and kept it pushing. But on the inside, I felt like the worst human rights activist to have ever walked the earth. I said nothing because at the time, what was there to say? I was stunned at the fact that the word hang was even said to me. If you are one of the non-elephants in the jungle, you have already told me in your head that this was no big deal and that my boss meant no harm. If you are anything like myself, you recognize that while this is nothing to start an office revolution over, it was still a horrible choice of words said by someone who should know better in 2017, which is pretty much any and every white person living in this country. I spoke to a close aunt of mine, who happens to be an HR representative, about the situation and she took the non-elephant stance. She said that the incident would never go further than mediation and that I can be quite hypersensitive about race. My initial thought was, "Bitch, as I should be. How are you not?" But What I actually said was "I guess" and again, kept it pushing. From this entire situation, all I can say is that while I admit that I am a black panther party organizer waiting to happen, I am also a college educated, multi-faceted, well rounded individual who can take an unbiased look and say that this is more of a problem than people seem to think. We are approaching 2018. Accurate or fabricated, there are thousands of informational sources being carried around in our pockets daily. Hell, libraries are still open too. There is not a valid excuse that exists for any type of cultural ignorance in this day and age. The small things that some white people get away with is how we got to the point of police brutality against blacks being punished with desk duty, violent descriptions in media of black criminals over sympathetic and less harsh descriptions of white criminals, Muslims being terrorists and White's just having mental disabilities, and jokes about lynching made by white bosses to black employees. I recognize that this does not account for all white people and I also recognize that my boss doesn't actually want to see me hanging from a tree. But that does not change the fact that ethnic people in this country have lost sight of the real goal here, human normalcy. We at some point want to be identified by our character and not by our color, sex, religion, financial income, or anything else unrelated to how we treat people. Don't mistake a lack of blatant racial discrimination for a change in social mentality. Be aware of the fact that legislation is the only reason we aren't still sharecropping, not a nation wide change of heart and mindset. There are still enough social inequalities that work against us in this country to fill every line of a college ruled composition book. If being racially hypersensitive is the only way for me to make sure that my people are actually being treated equally and not just appearing to be treated equally, then so be it. 

[lligkv]

a fantasy of unselfconscious being

Natasha Stagg’s Sleeveless is a book of essays written about the NYC media scene of the 2010s. It’s a particular, hermetic scene, and NYC isn’t quite the cultural center it was in mid-century America. But it has given Stagg, who has worked in advertising, fashion, tech, and magazines, the benefit of close proximity to some crucial transformations in American life, like shifting definitions of privacy as social media, content creation, and the generation of data for corporations become increasingly prevalent; the rise of image-making and the personal brand as a fundamental and increasingly automatic element in life online; and the emergence of the quintessential “body trend” of the past decade: an “in transition” or “work-in-progress” body—a body that’s actively being altered and changed, through makeup trends and modification, with the changes being documented and turned into content as they happen.

“New ways of branding,” as she puts it, “are unquestionably informing the ways in which we think.” And it’s harder to think of ourselves as we did “before we were made to feel so implicit in advertising.” “ If I look at it in a dystopian way,” she adds, “this might be the last chance I have to thoughtfully speak on these subjects before I forget them, like a dream, because of their very own projections.”

In the essay “Right Place,” Stagg disputes a claim Kanye West made that Kim Kardashian is the Marilyn Monroe of our time and posits that she’s actually our Marie Antoinette: “unexpected, obliviously reckless, and destined for demise.” It’s an inspired comparison. But “destined for demise” seems a bit much. It seems very unlikely Kim will die, or do much more than she’s doing now. More likely Kim will remain as she is now: an object of gossip and takes, good and bad, as she keeps amassing the profit of her show, her endorsements, and her product lines, undeterred. (In that way, Kardashian occupies the same position as another cultural object people talk about a lot these days, the HBO show Succession—which could be a satire, as some argue, or a straight drama, as others do; which could be said to critique the milieu it portrays or replicate its dynamics. Either way, neither its intent or effect much matters in the end. What matters is that it gets HBO new eyes, more advertising dollars, and more “relevance,” that much stronger a presence in pop culture.)

And ultimately, there may not be much profit at all in searching for cultural symbols from the past to compare Kim to, if the internet, advertising, the brand, and its consequences for our selves’ construction is truly the enduring transformation that Stagg’s book suggests.

“As women,” she writes, “we are so controlled by the impulsive beauty standards set by consumerism, the only way to take back control is to become,” like  Kardashian, “the standard by which beauty is measured.” The claim evokes Mark Fisher’s notion of capitalist realism—the idea there’s no imaginable alternative to capitalism. It also evokes the notion of human capital as Malcolm Harris explores it in his book Kids These Days: the idea that every one of us is a “capital project,” and it falls to us to live in ways that reduce our risk and increase our value.

If you’re on the internet in the 2010s, there’s a system so much bigger than you that you have no choice but to participate in. And you try to win its game by cultivating the most human capital you can, the strongest brand. That’s the only way you can gain any kind of foothold as you’re caught up in its wave, the only way you gain any shred of power against the system’s own power.

But even then, that power is only the most comfortable form of oppression. At one point in “Right Place” Stagg cites bell hooks’s assertion, in 2016, that the power that female performers like Beyonce have is “pure fantasy”—and she disagrees. Beyonce will always be “more popular” than Jay-Z, she points out. To her mind, the power held by media figures (often female) is greater than the power held by government or even money, and so female power like Beyonce’s and Kim’s is stronger than male power like the kinds Jay-Z or Kanye West have—which was power amassed through music and fashion, too, as opposed to sheer fame like Kim’s.

And sure, you could see it that way. But media power is basically popularity. And what can popularity really do besides keep you in the public eye with some degree of public favor? Isn’t the power that, say, Trump is capable of, as president, simply more than the power Kim Kardashian has? And isn’t that why Kanye West aspires to run for president, as, Stagg argues, Kim Kardashian would never do?

I would be willing to grant that the power of the media star may entail less risk than that of the politician, or a more manageable kind of stress. And in that sense it makes sense Kim Kardashian would desire it more. But it also achieves less. The power of fame occurs within a system, and it yields a profit that redounds only to you. Meanwhile, the politician’s power, executed well—or even executed poorly, clumsily, almost inadvertently, as Trump’s case shows—can change that system, in that it can both profit you and oppress others.

What’s more, the power of fame comes at the expense of having to please people, and to deal with their prying eyes, scrutinizing every corner of your life…

The idea that all parts of your life might be open for you to broadcast and monetize, as they are for influencers—those who are paid to exhibit and endorse products or services on social media, in money or in more nebulous reward like attention or recognition—disturbs Stagg as it does me. Sleeveless is especially interesting when it engages with those who aspire to join the Kardashian ranks or to be the ones who might create new Kardashians; those who strike the Faustian bargain of privacy and integrity for fame with avidity. In a companion piece to “Right Place” titled “Right Time,” Stagg profiles Adam Rivietz, founder of #paid, an agency that manages the careers of influencers. When Stagg shares her fears about the all-encompassing nature of the project of fashioning your self as a brand, Rivietz seems to agree. “But if you’re on the founding side of it,” he tells her, “you can choose how you want to guide the industry, what governing bodies you’re going to work with to maintain standards.”

The comment suggests, again, that when capitalism becomes capitalist realism, we’re all helpless but to succumb. In fact, you’d be stupid to refuse the chance to make money off your platform, if the things you do on that platform would boost a company’s profits anyway. That’s the argument that influencer agencies like #paid make: “Your brand is already established, they coax. If you’re not making money from it, you’re working for free.”

As Stagg notes, that’s not really how economies work. It’s not a given that any social media activity you make is automatically a brand from which you should, if you’re smart, profit. Companies like #paid had to make the conversion of social media activity to a brand an economically attractive proposition. But the “brand”—which, at its core, is just the sum of the impressions of yourself that you leave behind anytime you use a social media tool, once those impressions become regular enough to be coherent as a product of their own—is just so integral to the self as it’s registered online, as all selves in the 2010s must be. And the project of creating a branded self is just so open to monetization now. In time it might become one of the last sure ways to make a lot of money, if that’s what you’re after, as industries like manufacturing, media, and retail all fall victim to offshoring or automation or monopoly. It’s all too easy to think of it that way.

Maybe the moment we created an image of our lives, online, that differed or just had the potential to differ from our lives as we live them, we crossed a Rubicon. The idea of the influencer became a threat. And then, throw in neoliberal conditions—sanction the consolidation of industries in service of the hypercapitalist pursuit of profit; get rid of the safety net that might make life less precarious and the need for money of some kind less pressing—and the influencer becomes an inevitability.

All this ties into something I’ve been thinking about for a long while: my sense, like so many others’, that “selling out,” which used to be such a thing when art and advertising were separate—when advertising and the market were a centrifugal force that orbited around “real,” “authentic” life—isn’t really a coherent concept anymore. When did that happen? When did that centrifuge collapse?

That’s the question Sleeveless explores—when did advertising, both the industry and of the self, take over everything?—and quite well. It provides no answers (and I wonder if any of us have those). But in the process of describing the fashion, media, advertising, and branding landscapes as she’s watched them evolve, Stagg gives you many small, sharp insights. For instance, when Stagg describes the way that advertising so often incorporates the tools people use to criticize it, like sarcasm or memes (think the Wendy’s Twitter feed), she writes: “Corporations, as they say, are people. And people, it seems, are corporations.” As I write that out, it sounds banal—but I also think, Of course. Why wouldn’t that maxim, corporations are people, cut both ways? And then we meet the kind of person-as-corporation she means: Torri Webster, one of #paid’s “content creators,” who’s the quintessential millennial subject by Harris’s definition—efficient, hypercompetent, devoted to cultivating her human capital. When Webster speaks, it’s like a job application statement come to life: “Being a creator is wonderful,” she says, “because it has given me the opportunity to gain interdisciplinary skills.” By the close of “Right Time,” she’s already preparing to shift her work away from writing paid posts for brands to meet the economy’s next permutation, whatever that will be.

Which leads me to the endpoint of all this. Do you accept the hell we’re in, like Webster or Rivietz, or do you squirm in it, as Stagg does?

And those are the options. Effective resistance is impossible. Especially now that the system that’s constituted by branding, advertising, and online self-creation has outpaced the language one might use to critique it, like “fake.” When a male model leaves a comment on Kim Kardashian’s Instagram accusing her and her carefully constructed body of being fake, Stagg sees his point; she also thinks, “None of this is real, so calling her ‘not real’ seems beside the point.”

If you tell an influencer she’s “not real,” the answer she gives you might be that of the competitor—putting you right on her same plane: “I know it’s not real. Are you jealous of what I have—what I’ve built?” (That’s the angle Kardashian seems to have taken—in a way. She accused the model of being critical because he was gay and therefore not attracted to her—which wasn’t true.) Or, the influencer might assume the role of the victim. “What did I do to you? I’m just minding my own business. I’m just trying to survive.” This too allows her to leverage her platform to subsume your criticism. In arousing the sympathy of her followers, she turns your criticism into another part of her brand’s narrative. Either way, it’s clear the influencer and her critic exist in the same world—and the critic’s criticism won’t get her out of it.

When self-knowledge emerges from self-creation, and when self-creation is about the way you brand and sell yourself, does self-knowledge become meaningless? Say you don’t participate in the influence economy, when the possibility of doing so is available to us and feels both natural and imperative. Does the thing that is “you” dissolve? Like a tree in the forest with no one to hear? At the end of the essay “Naming Names,” at the very end of the book, Stagg has a fight with her boyfriend. She writes, “I was so completely in love and heartbroken thinking that maybe it wasn’t the last time I would be.” And suddenly, she’s face to face with the paralyzing question we all have to deal with when we’re simultaneously selves and personal brands: Is anything she feels genuine, or is it all part of the image of herself she wants to construct?

I remembered being alone on my roof in the summer, single, and enjoying it. Had I enjoyed it, or had I taken photos of myself to feel distracted? I could be alone again, I thought, as long as I didn’t know that’s what I was.

First, there’s the memory. Then, there’s the doubt of the memory. Finally, there’s the fantasy of unself-conscious being. But the curse of this time we live in is that you’ll always have this sense of what you are.

[therightlook126-blog]

South Asia

The beauty and wellness industries in India grow about 20% every year; weight-loss and skin-lightening industries are booming and contribute to the growth of the beauty industry. Advertising in India is a huge promoter for these beauty standards; a substantial amount of advertising in India comes from the West as companies such as Loreal, Revlon, Cosmopolitan and Elle. The Bollywood industry also has a hand in the promotion of skin-whitening and weight loss. Light-skinned and thin actresses are hired a majority of the time; we have seen actresses such as Deepika Padukone, Aishwarya Rai, and Kareena Kapoor. The way that these women are portrayed in these films and are seen in the public eye encourage South Asian women to conform to Western beauty standards; the glorification of fair skin has pushed many women in South Asia to purchase skin-bleaching products. In addition, some Bollywood actresses have promoted skin-whitening products. Fair & Lovely is the most consumed skin-whitening product and stems from a large issue of colorism. Advertising for this product is seen on all forms of media and promotion, from billboards to television. Other companies, such as Neutrogena, Garnier, Loreal, and Vaseline, have started to make their own skin-whitening products because they notice the popularity of this custom. 

The “value” of a South Asian woman depends on the fairness of her skin and the male gaze, especially when it comes to marriage. Fair-skinned girls are sought after because they are deemed as “more attractive.” Even in South Asian history, fair skin was often associated with wealth, whereas dark skin was associated with poverty. When the British colonized South Asia, they established themselves with power and status, which led to South Asians associating these things with fair skin. Prior to British colonialism, the caste system enforced colorism, and South Asian kings and queens were often depicted with lighter skin. 

Focusing more into these beauty standards we see India becoming more known not only for their great food and style, but for plastic surgery too. India is the fifth global destination for tourism and plastic surgery, is one of the reasons for it. Reasons why it is so popular to get done in India is because there is a much cheaper cost to get it done. In the beginning it was more Americans going to India to get this cosmetic surgery done. India saw it as a taboo. But with time, the Indian middle class has been one of the top clients in this industry. With that, traditionally, plastic surgery is a women’s market, but many men have been seen getting it done as well. Not only is that surprising, but younger clients are starting to be more prevalent too. Some women are 20 years old going to get work done, and some even younger than that. Some of the many procedures they do in this industry are botox to get rid of wrinkles, liposuction, face lifts, nose jobs, breast augmentation, and several more. It is not seen as a taboo anymore, but more so on how can I enhance my natural beauty?

Taking a further look into South Asia, let’s talk more about a country that does not follow these traditions as much. Pakistan! While America is a diverse culture, Pakistan does not have that much ethinic diversity. Many of the women have to follow strict standards in order to be accepted. Since marriage is so important in this society, women always have the pressure of being dressed conservatively and groomed at all times. A major obsession in this culture is to have fair skin. One of the biggest industries in Pakistan is the bleaching industry. While being tan is socially accepted in the US, people in Pakistan consider it to be ugly. Another essential for the ladies is to have no body hair. In the Pakistan culture it’s almost like a taboo. Women are always getting their eyebrows threaded or getting waxed to get rid of all their body hair. Women here also strive for clear skin and long luscious hair. However most, if not all of the products they use are completely natural versus products that contain chemicals (like the US). They use plenty of moisturizers and oils for their hair and skin. Turmeric being one of the essentials. Which we are now starting to see being used more now in the United States. 

Beauty is different in Africa where women consider internal beauty more important than physical beauty. African women think beauty is women who are intelligent, kind, respectful and compassionate. A woman is more beautiful if she helps others and tries to keep harmony within her tribe. One tribe the Nuba women paint their bodies and face using calamine lotion and  a matchstick. Tribes discourage the using skin lightening creams that some women use to get that light-skinned look that in America people find beautiful. Yet, the Nuba women find anything that damages their natural black skin to be violent to their skin. Therefore, this goes against the Nuba women’s motto of keeping peace within tribes and also to appreciate their body as the way God designed it. However, this tribe has been known to use soil or herbs to protect their skin from the harmful rays from the sun. 

In South Africa, the Xhousa people carve stripes on women’s face as a sign of beauty. These stripes are carved into the woman’s face on her cheeks and they are usually horizontal lines. As well as the stripes can be on the forehead. For the Sorma people in Ethiopia body painting is seen not only as a sign of beauty, but as a celebration. A celebration about all the lives of the women of this tribe. Women go down to the river and paint each other’s faces with white chalk. The paintings include eye masks with circle designs and different face masks with red and white colors. Something characteristic of these body paintings is when they are used to show a woman’s bond with another bond. Sorma women paint identical designs on each other to show that the other woman is her best friend. The designs being the same design shows that the two women share a close bond. These body paintings also make women attractive to potential husbands. The Sorma people believe in the beautiful nature of the naked body, so the body paintings are all over the woman’s body. The more colorful or intricate the designs makes the women more attractive. 

While many countries are starting to follow some of the US footsteps, Pakistan still has the idea that natural beauty is beautiful in itself, and we should embrace it. Everyone has their own idea of beautiful, and everywhere you go they will say it is different. It even varies from person to person. So, what do you think is the right look for you?

India becoming more known for their plastic surgery. 

Women in Pakistan dressed to perfection. 

[dhallucr-blog]

Nike’s Kaepernick Campaign: Hegemony, Alienation, & Flak

Nike’s Colin Kaepernick campaign and President Donald Trump’s fixed attention on the Kaepernick campaign are examples of how those in power use the media to reinforce Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony in “Hegemony, Intellectuals and the State.” Whereas Nike exploits lower tiers’ alienation in a capitalist society, a concept explained by Arthur Asa Berger in “Alienation” and “The Consumer Society”, President Trump deploys flak, the fourth propagandist filtre listed by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in “Propaganda Model”, to sway public opinion concerning Nike’s Kaepernick endorsement.

Nike’s advertisement featuring partnership with professional football player Colin Kaepernick critiques America’s hegemonic practices while the campaign itself epitomizes hegemonic practices. According to Gramsci, “the attempt to exercise power will always be made to ensure that force will appear to be based on the consent of the majority, expressed by the so-called organs of public opinion—newspapers and associations— which, therefore, in certain situations, are artificially multiplied” (75). The “believe in something even if it means sacrificing everything” campaign attempts to win the consent of subordinate groups through coercion. For example, market research has shown that Nike customers are mostly marginalized youths. Thirty-Mile Zone Sports calculates that “13% of Americans identify as African American, yet 18% of Nike buyers are black. Hispanics account for 16% of the population, but represent 19% of Nike buyers. And, Asians account for 3% of the population, but 5% of Nike customers” (TMZ sports). Given that Nike’s consumer base reflected a large number of minorities pre-Kaepernick endorsement, the advertisement implies more of a power move to manipulate lower tiers into a buying mood. How ever Nike expresses pro equality for people of color throughout the media the company is still a leader in violence overseas involving child labor, poor working conditions, and underpay for people of color. Clearly Nike’s endeavor sides more with sustaining capitalist hegemony than exercising activism.

Evoking emotion to manipulate marginalized audiences to spend their hard working money is a propagandist technique to maintain the hegemonic class system and shows an exploitative relationship between high and low tiers. According to Arthur Asa Berger, “People must be driven to consume, must be made crazy to consume, for its consumption that maintains the economic system. Thus the alienation generated by a capitalist system is functional, for the anxieties and miseries generated by such a system tend to be assuaged by impulsive consumption” (52). As Nike co-opts a social movement for its own private gain, people of color are emotionally moved by the company’s political stance and are even more motivated to consumption, a symptom of their alienation. For example, post-Kaepernick advertisement Nike had made $6 billion, claims Alex Abad-Santos on Vox magazine. That’s $6 billion Nike has made off of the alienated spirit in America’s capitalist society and not a portion of the revenue went to scholarship, charity, or society’s alienated. Berger quotes Karl Marx, “Every man speculates upon creating a new need in order to force him to a new sacrifice, to place him in a new dependence, and to entice him with a new pleasure and thereby in economic ruin. Everyone tries to establish over others an alien power in order to find there the satisfaction of his own egotistical need” (52). It appears that Nike established an alien power over subordinate groups especially given that their campaign diverted people’s attention from police brutality and their core message once analyzed translates to “buy shoes” which thus maintains the consumer culture and America’s hegemonic class system.

Though there has been an equilibrium of positive and negative media attention regarding Kaepernick being the face of Nike’s 30th anniversary campaign, President Donald Trump used his power and influence to bring more attention to negative media responses by producing flak to sustain hegemonic structuralism. According to Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, “The producers of flak add to one another’s strength and reinforce the command of political authority in it’s news-management activities. The government is a major producer of flak, regularly assailing, threatening, and ‘correcting’ the media, trying to contain any deviations from the established line.” (28) President Donald Trump over a multitude of social media tweets has publicly rejected Nike’s decision to make Kaepernick the new face of their brand for the reason that Trump deems Kaepernick unpatriotic and his actions (kneeling during the national anthem) disrespectful to the American flag. One of Trump’s tweets read:

“Just like the NFL, whose ratings have done WAY DOWN, Nike is getting absolutely killed with anger and boycotts. I wonder if they had any idea that it would be this way? As far as the NFL is concerned, I just find it hard to watch, and always will, until they stand for the FLAG!” (Twitter).

Many right-wing conservatives, the bulk of Trump’s voters and social media followers, in response to Trump’s censure, took to twitter to burn their Nike sneakers. Trump’s power and influence to produce flak may have to an extent persuaded public opinion as Trump used propagandist techniques by associating two unrelated concepts to push hegemonic structuralism. As Trump’s statement implies, one can’t be patriotic and stand against systemic injustices, one can’t be patriotic and continue to watch the National Football League when players kneel, and those who approve of Nike’s Kaepernick campaign aren’t after all true patriots.

Overall, both Nike and President Donald Trump are large entities prevalent in mass media that act within hegemonic structuralism to main existing class systems such as capitalism and social stratification. The aftermath of Colin Kaepernick protesting police brutality led to Nike and President Trump, being powerful influencers and leaders’, to deter the public from America’s injustices to support private interests. For example, Nike manipulated its consumers’ alienation in society to support a cause that Nike fails to support in its entirety other than through motivating people to buy their shoes. Further, Trump has also deterred the public from the social movements political message by translating Kaepernick’s protest to unpatriotic. Both used media to exploit and mislead the masses and in doing so have acted to maintain hegemony.

Works cited

Abad-Santos, Alex. “Nike's Colin Kaepernick Ad Sparked a Boycott - and Earned $6 Billion for Nike.” Vox, Vox Magazine, 24 Sept. 2018, www.vox.com/2018/9/24/17895704/nike-colin-kaepernick-boycott-6-billion.

Berger, Arthur.“Alienation” and “The Consumer Society” in Media Analysis Techniques.6th edition. San Francisco State University, USA.

Gramsci, Antonio.  “Hegemony, Intellectuals and the State,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey, pp. 75-80. New York: Routledge, 1994[2013].

Herman, Edward and Chomsky, Noam. “A Propaganda Model,” in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), pp. 1-35.

Staff, TMZ. “Nike's Colin Kaepernick Deal Adds Up When You See Customer Data ... And We Did.” TMZ, TMZ.com, 10 Sept. 2018, www.tmz.com/2018/09/06/colin-kaepernick-nike-contract-urban-consumers-market-research/.

Trump, Donald (@realdonaldtrump). “Just like the NFL, whose ratings have done WAY DOWN, Nike is getting absolutely killed with anger and boycotts. I wonder if they had any idea that it would be this way? As far as the NFL is concerned, I just find it hard to watch, and always will, until they stand for the FLAG!” Sept 5, 2018. 6:39 AM. Tweet.

[cyclone5000]

I was inspired to ask you this question because of the ccs content you've been reblogging (love that show btw). So as far as I know Japan is not a very gay friendly country, certainly not as friendly as some people believe. The MalexMale and FemalexFemale content is marketed to specific groups and usually shows them in ways that are kind of demeaning, like having one of the males being touched against his will (like full blown raped in some cases) by his future lover. (to be continued)

So my question is, how come Sailor Moon and Card Captor Sakura were able to get away with showing Gay couples in their shows (and well developed, healthy gay couples at that) back in the 90s? It was censored in America but Japan didn’t seem to have a problem with it, and as far as I know both shows were mainstream shows in Japan and marketed to large groups, not like Yuri and Yaoi normally are. Is it just cause they were side characters? Any chance you know the answer to this question?

uhhhh tbh I don’t know if there is a right answer to this…I’m unsure if I’m the one who can provide one at least. 

I’m not that well versed in this kind of stuff. And I’ll be honest, I’m little confused by this ask…I’ll answer it as best as I can. But, I’m just gonna tell you right off the bat that  this is 100% my speculation. Don’t take this as a serious answer :x 

With the way this kind of question is worded…it sounds like you’re comparing the same sex couples in SM and CCS to yaoi and yuri genres? And if that’s the case…well…your answer is right there… you’re basically comparing magical girl anime to pornography….

I mean, don’t get me wrong. Japan is definitely not an LGBT friendly place. But, the adult industry is all about fantasizing to the point of fetish-sizing. It is purposely formulaic. Why? Because a kink is marginally easier to sell than a person. And this is something that can be applied to international adult markets. Ever notice how there are several categories on porn sites, but no real variety within the category’s content?  Yeah that’s no coincidence. Adult entertainment is not about reinventing the wheel, they follow the patterns that are known to work.

Yaoi and Yuri definitely are applied this notion. I think the fact that it’s animanga further allows readers to detach it from reality. Like in the case with the yaoi genre, a huge premise behind it’s creation is ‘forbidden romance’ and its after effects. Caste systems, falling in ‘love’ with someone who you can’t have, power dynamics, the whole ‘i’m not gay but you did this one thing to me and now i can’t forget how incredible it made me feel and so i’m confused until this story reaches a conclusion’–all of this and more get cranked out to the extreme because it sells this romanticized POV of Taboo. 

It’s kind of a no brainer to see how incredibly inaccurate these genres are at depicting actual same sex relationships. But the whole point of the genre is…well not to. I’m not saying that it’s a good thing or anything. (I think a major issue within the adult industry and pornographic material is how unregulated it is in favor of it turning out a profit. Studies have show that people wind up believing what porn shows because of their lack of sex education…but adult industries don’t feel pressured to cared about that really…which does have a negative impact…lol i wrote a paper about this once).

I know bc of the nature of the Internet and stuff, Yaoi/Yuri is often lumped together with regular mlm and wlw love stories. Yes, you’ll find some sense of similarities on how sexual these stories can be. But I think there there is a major difference in yaoi vs shonen ai or yuri vs shoujo ai. And that difference boils down what kind of story the author wants to tell. And what kind of impression the author wants to leave in their reader’s minds. 

Which I’ll transition to SM and CCS now. These series had a specific story in mind, and in order to tell that story; the author(s) made conscious decisions to have characters and couples to display it. I don’t think that they ‘got away’ with anything. In the case with these two shows, in order to display themes and other elements of their fictional verse, they created gay characters to illustrate them in ways the other cast members couldn’t.  The gay and lesbian characters/moments weren’t just added in without consideration. They were an integral part to the plot. They had purpose. And with that in mind, they were created.  The reason why they are good and healthy depictions of relationships is because of the actual format of the genre. These are magical girl stories. The priority is telling a good story. I don’t think they were just token characters, they were woven into the plot extremely well. And if you have a well written character, that’s gonna have a way better impact than a ill written one. 

There was a lot of effort and care put into both of these series. That’s why they left a strong impact that’s still prevalent today. I don’t know too much about Japanese culture and stuff. Under my assumption, I don’t think they are focused on LGBT representation. It was the 90′s. It was rare to find anyone that pushed for proper representation right, hell it’s still rare in present day!  But even if it’s not a primary acceptance for the culture as a whole, for one reason or another, it was impertinent  to the authors. That’s why they made them, that’s why they were weaved into the story. Japan is known for its subtlety. These characters were homosexual, but it was quiet. No one was blunt about it at least. These could be factors of why it was broadcasted as widely as it was. idk for sure, but my gut does tell me that it was a  positive if anyone did oppose of it. 

Like, with SM, I couldn’t tell you what Takeuchi had in mind while conceiving the story…If I’m not mistaken. I believed she made the first ark and was pretty okay with it. But when she gained popularity she was asked to create more, and thus made four more SM series. If the publishing company is asking her to continue her story…chances are they’re gonna let her draw/write what she wants. SM was already a running series by the time Haruka and Michiru came about. That whole ark was specifically about the talismans they held. Takeuchi might have had her own reasons for writing a romance between them, but I personally don’t know what they are. If that’s what she wanted though, that’s what she was gonna do. If the story is good enough to pull in sales and readers, then it’s okay. I can’t remember if there was a big uproar about it. I don’t think there was at least. 

CCS is a little different seeing as it was created by CLAMP and a different publisher. CLAMP in of itself have always been kinda progressive. I mean, within this series alone…one of the big themes is love and memory. Specifically how those two things are so different person to person. I know that tumblr and other social media likes to comment about the gay couples in the show (I don’t blame them lol), but sometimes it’s easy to forget some of the…not so easy to accept romances in the show. There were a lot of romantic feelings between students and teachers. Most of them having a large age difference between them. There were some things that crossed over family lines too. Their push for risky romance, did not stop at just same-sex couples. It was all across the board. CLAMP has always been one of those authors teams that pushed ‘there are many versions of love and just bc you don’t like it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist’ mindset. Even if people didn’t agree with the message, it didn’t stop or deter them from their success. And again…I feel like if I was a publisher…and I had a material for long running success…I’d take it lol. CCS had a lot of promise. 

Hell, look at YO/I rn. The author was always straightforward about Victor and Yuuri being a couple. And they got it through to completion. Why? Because the story was good enough to win people over. I know that sounds like a simple answer to such a complicated issue (it’s really hard getting variety and representation in animanga) but if the team believes in a project, and there is promise in its creation…there is history of studios caving in and allowing it to get created. And this isn’t just for gay love stories. It goes for a bunch of different things…like, look up how Cowboy Bebop’s concept got created! It makes me laugh every time i think about it XD That is like a prime example of someone getting to make what they want and the result being outstanding. all bc the publisher didn’t care so long as they got one thing correct.

BUT I don’t know for sure. It’s not like I’m able to find direct interviews with the authors of SM and CCS. I don’t know what they were actually thinking when creating their stories. Or why they specifically designed the characters the way they did. 

But the same sex couples in these series will almost always be better than say other stories in the yaoi/yuri genres. And that’s just simply due to writing. The authors made characters to fit within their worlds. They didn’t just create characters that had slight variations of the same exaggerated animanga tropes. 

It’s kinda sad when I think about it. mlm stories are being catered to the female gaze while wlw stories are being created for men….why? bc according to publisher, those are the demographics that will purchase these works…I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I think that a lot of people have their preferences and types–but no one is gonna reject a truly good story! lol, even if there are gems within the same sex genres, make so mistake. They can be really hard to find.

I’m not Japanese. Hell I’m Indian-American. That’s like the double opposite of Japanese LOL. For SM and CCS, I don’t know what are the priorities for these publishing studios were. I’m just guessing that it’s success/numbers and thus they allowed for the story to take flow naturally. I don’t know for sure though. I could be completely wrong here. I’d urge you to try and find the answer elsewhere, I’m actually not like a super-fan about these kinds of shows :x hell I don’t really read yaoi or yuri anymore…

but I hope this at least created some kind of stepping stone for you to seek out the proper answer to your question. ^^’ sorry I wasn’t more help. 

[johnboothus]

Can Hip Hop Help Solve Wines Millennial Problem?

Joey Bada$$ travels with a bottle of Sancerre in his rider. Although he claims to have only started drinking upon reaching legal age, now at a ripe 25 years old, the Brooklyn-born rapper has an affinity for a chilled glass of French Sauvignon Blanc. Every day A$AP Rocky spends his time drinkin’ wine, feelin’ fine, while the Migos trio — Quavo, Offset, and Takeoff — like their pours over meals at Michelin-star restaurants. And rarely do you catch Drake on his Instagram Stories or in an interview without a wine glass in hand. They don’t call him Champagne Papi for nothing, after all.

These are just a small fraction of rappers known to boast about their developed palates in song lyrics and on their social media pages. As their careers and fan bases have grown over time, so have their tastes and pleasures, and that’s never been more prevalent in the music as it is now. “Hip hop has always shown wine love. It’s always been a way of painting a more luxurious picture,” says Jermaine Stone, the wine auctioneer and CEO of Cru Luv Wines, a wine branding and marketing company dedicated to blending the worlds of wine and hip hop.

Stone, host of the podcast “Wine & Hip Hop,” adds, “Hip hop has a way of just grabbing luxury things and ingraining them into our day to day lives.”

In 2017, hip hop became the most popular music genre in the U.S. with eight of the top 10 most popular artists being rappers, according to a Nielsen Music/MRC data report. Drake and Kendrick Lamar, who once rapped about sipping Carlos Rossi’s notable jug wine, held the first and second spots, respectively. The genre continued to dominate the music industry in 2018 and 2019, and Nielsen speculates that hip hop is on track to maintain its lofty position at the top in 2020.

The significance of hip hop’s reach and influence over tens of millions of Americans, at this point, is undeniable. And the flair and cadence of rappers’ personal delights is trickling over into the wine industry more than ever. No longer are they the ones merely mentioning wine in songs, they’re selling it and it’s capturing the attention of millennial drinkers.

This development comes at a crucial time for the wine industry. Wine’s share of the drinks market dropped in 2019 for the first time in 25 years, according to research firm IWSR. The downward trend has largely been ascribed to millennial drinkers, who are increasingly drinking across category lines, often opting for hard seltzer and cocktails over wine. So can hip hop’s increasing interest help solve wine’s millennial problem?

Credit: Maison No. 9 / Instagram.com

Hip Hop’s Wine Presence

Since his 1996 debut, music mogul Jay-Z continues to floss about the finer things in life, including vintage wine like Château Pétrus. He essentially introduced his fans to the luxury bubbles of Champagne Cristal before wooing the masses with his gold-bottled Armand de Brignac Champagne — otherwise known as Ace of Spades, which he now owns. His success within the wine industry has sparked the interests of more artists looking for a way to capitalize their brand and expound on their love of wine. Now partnerships between winemakers and artists are increasing with music industry vets like E-40, Nicki Minaj and John Legend developing their own labels.

Just this year alone, hip hop rocker Post Malone traded in his beerbongs for his own rosé label, Maison No. 9. Before its official launch in June, the Grammy winner sold a whopping 50,000 bottles of the French pink wine in a two-day pre-sale and even caused the online wine retailer Vivino to crash, according to a TMZ report. Meanwhile, Snoop Dogg recently released his new wine, Snoop Cali Red — a red blend of Petite Sirah, Zinfandel, and Merlot — in partnership with the Australian wine brand 19 Crimes.

Credit: 19 Crimes / Instagram.com

Engaging Millennials with Music and Wine

At Fantinel Winery in Friuli Venezia Giulia, CEO Marco Fantinel, calls the pairing of hip hop and wine industries a “magic formula” for generating a “modern approach in the world of wine culture, which is based on traditional and often outdated communication styles.”

Mary J. Blige, largely regarded as a queen of hip hop and R&B, partnered with Fantinel Winery to produce her Sun Goddess Wines — a bottle collection composed of a Pinot Grigio Ramato and a Sauvignon Blanc — that launched in June. “We strongly believe in the coupling of music and entertainment-wine,” says Fantinel, noting that while winemakers are great at producing the product, they are often limited in marketing and communication efforts.

With a global powerhouse like Blige backing the label, a winery’s potential to attract thirsty customers can increase significantly. “The bond with a top-level artist can certainly speed up a brand’s notoriety process. If the product is excellent as well, the result is a success,” he says.

Although wine volume sales in the U.S. have declined as millennials’ interests in other categories increases, this demographic still represents the industry’s biggest opportunity for growth. In a 2019 video broadcast, Rob McMillan, the founder and executive vice president of Silicon Valley Bank’s wine division, advised wine industry leaders to increase direct-to-consumer sales and provide more social-media-friendly wine experiences for young drinkers as a way to revive the category’s popularity among millennials.

But bridging the cultures between wine and hip hop — millennials’ most preferred music genre — could prove to be among the most beneficial means of turning attention back to wine. “The more commingling the better,” Stone says. “I’ve now seen so many hip hop and wine events and people branding themselves through hip hop and wine. And every time we do that, what it really highlights is how much each one of these things can impact people from all different walks of life — and bring people from all different walks of life together.”

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