October 2021 Meeting Transcript: Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name
Brandon’s note: In the past couple months, I’ve shed light on some of the stories in Book Club’s community. The post below is what actually happens when the Club meets to share their thoughts, feelings and experiences about and around a given month’s selection. This transcript of our October 2021 meeting is lightly edited, only to give the reader more of the rhythm of the room’s speech.
Yahdon:
Okay. All right. Welcome to Literaryswag Book Club. We are in our 10th meeting of the year, two meetings away from another year in the books. I don't even know how many, we umpteen months in the middle of the pandemic. So thank you for making it again. How many new members are here? First time people, first time meeting, raise your hand. We got one. We got Maria. I always do this for everybody who's here. Can we unmute our cameras and let's give a round of applause for the new members who are attending their first meeting.
Yahdon:
So thank you for attending another Literaryswag Book Club meeting. I'm your host. This is the Literaryswag Book Club. We talk about books every last Wednesday of the month. I started this book club now going on six years ago as a partnership with Strand. And I started it mainly and particularly because I wanted to create a space for readers to engage with books. Because one of the things I realized in my time talking about books is that I was typically talking about books with writers, and I really wanted to create a different kind of space to hear how people who engage with books from a reader standpoint engaged. Meaning they're not necessarily invested in the craft and the sort of aesthetic questions of a book, but sort of the larger concerns of a book that when you end up writing books, you just lose touch with just how everyday people engage with the same piece of art that you do, but you lose, touch of that.
Yahdon:
So this Book Club has always served as a space and a place for me to, just remind myself that there are concerns larger than the ones that I'm used to being confronted with, which is like aesthetic concerns. And I'm always, just excited and humbled by how often y'all continue to come back month after month to have these discussions and particularly to have these discussions vulnerably and honestly with each other no matter what it is. Thank you. So just the layout, the way we do Book Club, what we do is we always do what is called the prompt. One of the members that has been here with us, Randy, he's going to be here late today. But before, when we used to do Book Club, everybody didn't get a chance to speak.
Yahdon:
The overview of the Book Club is we do a prompt that enables everybody to engage at the beginning of the meeting. And then after we do the prompt, we open it up for open forum conversation and anybody can talk about anything they want to, as it pertains to the book and even outside of the book. And then we talk for about an hour, hour, 15 minutes. Then we conclude the evening with my sort of recognition of the littest member of the meeting and littest members of the meeting. And it's usually people who, you know, just keep the conversation going, but also people who connect the conversation and keep us on track with how do we think through this conversation through the lens of the book.
Yahdon:
And then I announced the book for the next month. And then we have one of my favorite parts of the meeting is when we just do the good news section. So like people just sharing good news at the end of the meeting. It's always funny that at the end of the meeting, everybody's hesitant. And then once that first person shares their good news, it starts to just catch on and people just share that good news. And so we take our picture, everybody with the book and then we end, so, oh, Gila pulled up, what's up, girl, how you doing, um, Errol? I didn't greet you properly. I think Andrea is here, some more people is here, good seeing y'all. So we're going to jump into this month's prompt and this month's Book Club pick, which is, "Zami: A New Spelling of My Name" the biomythology by Audre Lord.
Yahdon:
As I said, last month, what we read, the Eula Biss book "Having and Being Had" I wanted to, when I look at these Book Club picks, I'm constantly looking for books that will encourage us and challenge us to have conversations that we, as a Book Club have not had, like we've read, you know, going on, like, I think at least 70, if not 70 plus books at this point. And so it's easy at this point to kind of circle a block, so to speak of like touching the same sort of topics what's difficult to do at the same time, is finding books that once again, like what haven't we talked about before, which is difficult, you know, specifically for Book Club members who probably weren't here, when we read a book by a certain author and you look back and you're like, I wish I would've joined at this point.
Yahdon:
So it's the equal challenge of both picking books that touch on some of topics that we talk about more often than not in this book club, but then also making sure I'm not failing, I'm not failing to address other topics that we didn't get to address as a Book Club when we were smaller. For example, a majority Black and Brown as it pertains to like just Latin-X and Black members. But since the Book Club has grown to East Asian and South Asian members and Muslim members and just different types of people coming into the Club. And I want to make sure that even though this Club started a certain way, that it doesn't stay that way. I'm always picking choices that reflect the growing community that you see on this zoom here.
Yahdon:
So that being said, I wanted to pick a book that really centered and really challenged us to think through queerness and gender identity and gender expression, language around all of the things so that we can have a conversation about something that is become something beyond like a sort of "social phenomenon," but a reality that we all have to reckon with whether we want to or not. And I thought like who better to help guide us through this conversation than Audre Lorde? So many people love quoting her essays, but I thought having her biomythology particularly, would be just a beautiful way to think about coming of age of a woman who understands her womanhood, not through a binary lens, but through something more fluid and in a gray area.
Yahdon:
So say that to say, I sent the prompt earlier, and we start with, I read it on page seven in that prologue where she writes, "I have always wanted to be both man and woman, to incorporate the strongest and richest parts of my mother and father within/into me to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks. I would like to enter a woman the way any man can, and to be entered-- to leave and to be left, to be hot and hard and soft all at the same time in the cause of our loving. I would like to drive forward and at other times to rest or be driven. When I sit and play in the waters of my bath, I love to feel the deep inside parts of me, sliding and folded and tender and deep. Other times I like to fantasize the core of it.
Yahdon:
my pearl, a protruding, part of me, hard and sensitive and vulnerable in a different way. I have felt the age-old triangle of mother father and child, with the "I" at its internal core, elongate and flatten out into the elegantly strong triad of grandmother mother daughter, with the "I" moving back and forth flowing in either or both directions as needed. Woman forever. My body, a living representation of other life older longer wiser. The mountains and valleys, trees, rocks. Sand and flowers and water and stone. Made in earth." And I was like, you know, these prompts are always difficult to come up with, cause I try to pick prompts that are both like engaging in a way where it gets us to think. But, not to the point where we have existential crisis thinking about the question. So something that is like light enough that we can all answer, but not too heavy to where it's like, "yo, I'm not showing up to this goddamn meeting, he want to know too much." So that being said with this Prologue that just sets this foreground for this conversation, I wanted to ask people, you know, contingent upon how you understood your gender identity. And this is a perfect segue. If you haven't, included your pronouns next to your name, please do so now I'm gonna do that too.
Yahdon:
Based on how you understood your gender identity growing up, what was something you wanted to have access to or do that because of the way the world understood your body, you were immediately told you couldn't engage in. One of the reasons why I wanted to base it there is because one of the things I really appreciate about this book is how much, how Audre Lord inhabits her body is just not an intellectual exercise. Like she just doesn't articulate intellectually what it means to be in her body, but also the sensory, the way she talks about the food and you can feel like the scene where she's in Harlem and she's talking about like white people spitting on her And she thinking the wind is like just... The visceralness of what it feels like to be in your body and from early ages, what your body can do and what it can't do based on what other people believe your body is and how we internalize those things and how it limits what our body can do. The way the prompt goes you say your name, where you're based at and then you answer the prompt. I always start it off.
Yahdon:
When I was growing up, I remember seeing somebody sit with their legs crossed and it was just like the coolest shit to me. And I remember I was trying to learn how to do it in the living room. And I remember my father like got mad and he liked took my leg and he picked that shit up and he damn near threw it. He threw it so hard that like my body flung across the couch. And he was like, I better never catch you sitting like that again. I remember just thinking from that point, how much I police my own body and what it did, especially around other Black men, what I learned in that moment and doing that and was like, how little freedom I could have in my own body from that point that I constantly had to watch how I moved in my body, because there was constantly someone else ready to tell me what my body could and couldn't do.
Yahdon:
I remember that being one of the first moments where I was just like, yo, this don't got nothing to do with anything. And he was just like, you ain't no woman, you better not sit like that. And I was just like, what was ironic was I saw a man do it. And so it was like, I was just from that point, it was, it's been a long time coming. I sit like that now I love sitting like that. That's a baller sit. Right. So that's my thing was the first moment having crossed legs being associated with femininity, I'm going to move it along. Abby it's on you.
Abby:
Hello, I'm Abby in Brooklyn. Pronouns are She/her, and the only thing that came to mind was, growing up I remember I couldn't stay out as late as my brother and he's younger than I am like in high school. So yeah, that is something that came to mind. I'm not sure if that's exactly what the prompt meant, but definitely because I was a girl and he was a guy and he could do whatever, but I had a curfew
Yahdon:
Damn, how many years? Not that it matters, it doesn't matter. But like, what was the year difference? Oh, goddamn.
Abby:
Well, two and a half, but yeah,
Yahdon:
No, that's crazy. You were a high school senior and you were in the house before the sophomore. That's wild style.
Abby:
Kind of. Yeah. I mean, there were exceptions, but yeah.
Yahdon:
Thank you, Andrea.
Andrea:
I think mine might be different just because my mom was so proactive in making sure I didn't feel limited by my gender. The one thing that I can remember is I had this like vocal uptick thing that I would always do. Like I asked everything like a question and instead of like, which is a very common thing women do, like constantly seeking affirmation. And she was like, you can't speak like that. And I remember like going into like speech therapy for them to like drill that out of me so I wouldn't have that. So it's kind of the opposite. Like it's a very common thing to do as a woman. And she's like, you're not going to, that's not something you're going to do.
Yahdon:
Okay. Okay. Thank you. Uh, who's next? Uh, Christy.
Christy:
Hey there. So I think the thing that I remember is when I was probably five or six, I remember being like tiny enough that I could sit on a skinny window sill. And I remember sitting there with the curtains open watching kids, probably I was five because I was watching them come back from school. I had on my underpants and no shirt. And my mom was like, "oh, you can't do that. You cannot sit in the window without a shirt on. You're a girl. You can't do that."
Yahdon:
Eggie on you, homie.
Eggie:
Double Dutch. So I, when I was growing up, when I was a little boy, there was a kid on my block named Jamie, never forgot, Jamie was nasty at the double Dutch. Right? And then everybody called Jamie gay. So he became "gay Jamie." Right? So because he used to double Dutch, so I never double Dutched on my block. It turns out when we got to high school, Jamie ain't even gay. So I had started to learn a bunch of games and I learned "spit" and I learned "numbers" cause I always wanted to play those games cause they was fun. But I could never learn double Dutch because by high school, you too old to be trying to get into the double Dutch line and can't double Dutch. So it's one of my bigger regrets.
Yahdon:
You missed the boat on the double dutch.
Eggie:
It's too late now, it's too late.
Yahdon:
I miss those double Dutch on the curb, in the hood.
Eggie:
That shit looked cool as hell bro.
Yahdon:
Errol on you, homie.
Errol:
Hey I'm Errol, I'm in Brooklyn, one that comes to mind I guess, is more recently is my mom's and the older people in my family's reaction to my hair. Once I started growing out the locks. Sort of saying, "you look like a girl or a Rasta or whatever."
Yahdon:
Eunice, on you.
Eunice:
Eunice from Columbus, Ohio. She/her. I was in high school, I ran track. At that point we wore hot pants. And so I was, I guess they would say "bulky" more or less, still small. And so I hated the gawking from the guys, so I wouldn't wear short pants. I was uncomfortable with it.
Yahdon:
And that's something like everybody on the track team wore. Right?
Eunice:
Well, they did, but I didn't like the way I look.
Yahdon:
Okay. Thank you, Gerald and Alyssa.
Gerald and Alyssa:
(Gerald)yeah, I'll go first since, I'm cooking, you know the vibes. For me, I remember really early on, when I started like grade school and I remember going, particularly like other boys in my school when we would like grab hands and come close and we hug each other. I remember I lingered a little bit too long and I remember the first time I heard the phrase, "no homo" or no, actually it wasn't even that at first. It was actually I remember going for like the handshake, then grabbing my friend, and then just like held him. I can remember the commentary I got from some of the boys that just saw and were witnessing that.
Gerald and Alyssa:
(Gerald) And I remember hearing the first time just like being ridiculed for like, "why are you holding him so long? Like, why are you hugging so long?" Then I remember like the perpetuated phrase that became like a recurring thing about always like, if you were going to show any like affection, particularly like between boys, but you always have to, after whatever, like "no homo." That always had to be said at my school. But I remember just processing, like why couldn't I just hold them? I am trying to remember like the exact context of just... And this is somebody I really care about that was in my neighborhood, that I hung out with all the time. I remember just like the social conditioning in that early stage of particularly just boys showing affection and how I do that with my body. And I remember just like, even just our cheeks were just really close to each other and just holding our cheeks, really close, and touching them and other boys like making that commentary with us. Yeah.
Yahdon:
Appreciate you sharing. Alyssa, on you.
Gerald and Alyssa:
I'm Alyssa, she/her pronouns. We live in Queens, Astoria. I'm a person with a lot of body hair and happened since I was like 10 and have been begrudgingly removing hair since I was like 10 and still do, still complain about it. I definitely have memories of like, not even realizing why, but my mom just being like, "here's Nair, let's try Nair. Let's like do this." And, not explaining anything, but it's just like what we did, you know what we do. But I still hate it, but also it was often associated with like bath time. And I loved the bath and I loved this prologue and just like the use of the bath and like water. Um, so appreciated the check-in question, too
Yahdon:
Thank you. Gilah.
Gilah:
Hi. Gilah. Brooklyn. She/her. Continuing the hair trend, not body hair, but like hair, hair. I wasn't even that little, but I think when I was like 20, I cut my hair really short for the first time pixie cut and my mom just freaked out and was like, "your hair is your femininity and is your beauty, et cetera." And I didn't even know she was really like that. It just came out of her as like, "don't cut your hair short, you're losing your femininity and your beauty. " And I was kind of not shook, but I was like, "okay, I see, I see how it is." So I think like so many women can relate to obviously their hair and being told you need to have it long, long, beautiful locks.
Yahdon:
Yeah. Appreciate you sharing. Jake, on you homie.
Jake:
Yeah. Eunice's comment made me think. I still think it's unfair, but especially as a little kid when everyone had to dress up and boys had to wear pants and girls got to wear skirts, I just, I was wanting to be able to wear shorts or wear a skirt. I felt like that was, I still feel like that, it's too warm to wear pants half the time. Like men should get to wear something short. Growing up with brothers, I think like, anytime you show emotion and that becomes like, "don't be a little girl" but like, don't do those things. I think that is like more of an impactful thing that around gender is something I can look back on and say, I had to conform a certain way because of it.
Yahdon:
Yeah. Thank you for sharing. Jules on you.
Jules:
Yeah. I was raised in a family that also was on the face of it feminist, in the sense that the messages were very much "you can be anything you want to be." But, I think right around 15, I had been really into theater and dance and I was a pretty performative kid. I think I internalized from many different places that it was just unsafe to show myself to the world and to be performative and to take up space because then my young sexualized body would be like hypersexualized by society or by people or by men around me. So it was more this idea that I had to curb certain parts of my personality so that I wouldn't be noticed too much. To be safe.
Yahdon:
Thank you for sharing. Kirstin.
Kirsten:
Kirsten. She/Her. I am in New York, so I was a really big tomboy growing up. My dad ran a dojo, so I was in a dojo from a really young age and I loved it and I used to fight in the boys division, I was pretty good. I didn't have anything at home obviously, my dad was like, "get out there." I didn't have anybody at home telling me I couldn't do anything, but it must've been fifth or sixth grade. I start getting crushes on people and realized pretty quickly that being able to beat up the guys, wasn't something at a certain age that was attractive to them. So, I took myself out of it. So that was probably the biggest thing. I think that relates to some of what Jake was talking about. As a guy you're told, if don't show emotion, don't be a little girl. And as a girl, and a woman, showing anger is something that's really not accepted. I've always had a bad temper and anger issues. And I think a lot of that is just suppression.
Yahdon:
Thank you, Kristin.
Kristin:
I can relate, Kristin with what you said, a lot. My dad used to tell me that I was too powerful all the time. And that I wouldn't be able to keep a man if I kept behaving that way. The other thing that I realized when I was really little was my voice when I got made fun of, for having a really deep voice as a woman. I remember thinking that it was so weird. Yeah, it was like such a strange thing. I can't help the way my voice sounds.
Yahdon:
Thank you, Laura.
Laura:
Okay. Am I here? Hello. Hi, I'm Laura. I live in Brooklyn. I was thinking about this. I was looking into this recently. I went to little street school. we had a little strange dress code. We didn't have a uniform, but we had very strange rules. It was pretty much all on the onus of the girls to adhere to the dress code. It was like, no cammo cause we went to like a peace loving school so nobody could wear camo. They would check the length of our skirts and we couldn't show our shoulders. For boys, it was like, don't let your dick hang out. I guess. I noticed, especially as I'm overweight in high school and I got a bad eating disorder my senior year and I lost a lot of weight very quickly. I noticed that last year, how differently my body was policed and that instead of this adherence to dress code that was disproportionately put onto the girls. There was these sexual overtones of like, "well, you're a little frail lady and you're gonna put yourself in danger and you can't show your shoulders to the boys because the boys can't be trusted." But only when I was this very small size, like very weak. It was very interesting.
Yahdon:
Thank You
Lise:
Hi everyone. My name is Lise. I'm actually in Montreal, um, temporarily, but I'm in Montreal, Canada. I can't think of an incident, that really stands out, but my mom herself, reminds me a lot of Audre Lord's mom. Both my parents are from Trinidad. My mom in particular is pretty masculine herself. I think I wanted to remove all my body hair when I was younger. And she was like, "no, leave it how you are. you were made that way." I don't feel like I was pushed into gender silos, but I was so confused about gender and because I wasn't getting pushed into these silos that I remember asking her, well, what's the difference between a boy and a girl. And I remember I was in second grade when I asked, I remember where I was in the kitchen and she said, "well, what kind of question is that?"
Lise:
And I really didn't understand because the mixed way that gender presented itself in our house and with her, and I said, "well, what makes a boy? And what makes a girl?" And she said, "a boy has a penis, a girl has a vagina." And I said, that can't be it. And she was like, "that's it." And I was like, so all of the other ways that you could be, it doesn't matter? It just depends on what you have in your underwear. And she said, "yeah." That's how gender was presented to me in this really kind of formative age. And to see the conversation evolve to where it is now kind of has me saying like, oh, I was right all along. It IS more than what you have between your legs. My mom was saying, "that's it, it's what you have between your legs." And I couldn't accept that but I accepted it because she told me I would've caught a backhand if I didn't accept it. It just didn't seem, it seemed like there was more to that answer. I needed more to the question than she gave me.
Maggie:
Hi, I'm Maggie, I'm in Seattle and I'm old and I've read this book first in high school. And so I had some emotional recall reading it, especially the first hundred pages. I remember our teacher getting in trouble for having us read it. We were freshmen, so it was 87, 88. So for the younger people, Hip Hop was really starting to take hold in culture. We just got warning labels on music, Lalapalooza hadn't happened yet. Al Gore ran for president for the first time. It was a weird time. And I think there was this reckoning with boomer parents that saw our culture and were scared. I remember this teacher like fighting for us. We were more diverse and inclusive with each other than our parents were, who were supposed to be like the hippies and the liberals.
Maggie:
And this is like west side of Chicago. And I remember reading this in the class. if you think about her experience, there was something about her for everyone in the class. Whether you can identify with being very poor or the immigrant experience or the color of your skin or however you were different. And at that time being just into high school, being exposed, now we have so many more voices, but back then this voice was so unusual and so different in the eighties when you were a kid. It was just, it was just really powerful to read again. Thank you so much. Sorry. I'm rambling.
Yahdon:
Nah, it's all good. Maria, welcome.
Maria:
Hi, I'm Maria I'm in Brooklyn also. Um, I think what came to mind was something that happened with my dad when I was 11. At the time I was learning to program to help out my sister who was like teaching a class and wanted someone to pass her materials. And I got really into it and I was quite good actually for an 11 year old. And I wanted to learn this new programming language that my dad always talked to my brother about who is a few years older than me, and kept trying to get my brother to learn. And I told him I was interested and my dad just told me that I shouldn't really do it because it's more of a boy thing to program. And after that, I kind of just lost interest in it. And my parents are actually like very progressive people, but there was still this sort of stereotypes of, professions that boys can do and professions that girls can do. And I think my dad was trying to get me away from what he thought was a boy's interests.
Yahdon:
Appreciate you sharing. Mike on you, homie.
Mike:
Hi, I'm Mike I'm from Atlanta. For me, I work in the fashion industry. Now it's like you have NBA players and a lot of men in the fashion industry, but at that time growing up, I had interest in getting into the industry and it's predominantly, women in the industry for fashion. And so just having that artistic drive, to design and an interest in the arts. I think for me, just like with family and friends, there were comments around that, kind of trying to steer me in one direction or the other, kind of away from that. Ultimately, I found my passion and everyone embraces it now, but definitely I think like 10, 15 years ago, that was more of a stigma around artistic fields. Certainly for myself.
Yahdon:
Yeah. Thank you. Um, did everybody go? I think Nuratu it's on you, and you're the last person, hopefully.
Nuratu:
Hi, I'm Nuratu. she/her. I'm calling from my new home in Brooklyn. Um, I'm a little late for the prompt. I will say that based on what everyone else said. I think one of the things that, oh, just tell me what the prompt was somebody please.
Yahdon:
No, the prompt was basically what was ...you bout to freestyle the damn answer to a prompt you aint know to buy time? The prompt is basically what was something based on how you understood your gender identity as a child, what was something you wanted to do that the world because of how the world saw you told you you couldn't or prevented you from doing
Nuratu:
Okay. As a kid, I was very thin and lanky, so I always wanted to do everything that the boys did, but the boys would never let me play. So if a boy told me that I couldn't play basketball, well, then that meant we had to fight. And so I would pick fights with boys to declare that I was going to do all the things that they could do and that there was no amount of me being a girl that would prevent me from doing it.
Yahdon:
Thank you. All right. I'm sorry. I miss one person, Forest it's on you, homie.
Forrest:
Hi, I'm Forrest. He/Him. I thought about this prompt. It was hard for me to really figure out something from my childhood.
Yahdon:
it can be from any time
Forrest:
I can say, as an adult, I, I still think that I struggle with, showing emotions in front of my children, where I think that as a dad, I can't, and I shouldn't as a man in going through everyday life. I don't know where I got it from, but you know, that, I assume that that men are expected to, uh, provide and behave in a certain way. Um, and it's something that I struggle with and I'm aware of, and I try to not pass onto my kids. It's hard. It sinks in and it's somewhat stuck.
Yahdon:
Yeah. I liked the language about it sinking in some and some of it stuck. One of the things in reading this book, that I appreciated the most. And this is, I think this book came out before Kimberly Crenshaw, created the phrase "intersectionality", but the way this book operates with an intersectional framework of identity, there are multiple identities occurring at the same time. And they overlap as opposed to the sort of Western linear framework of like, you have one identity and they layer on top of each other. So you're first a woman then you're black, or you're black, then you're this. And then you're that. And then you're that. This book was operating at the intersection. And I think that the fluidity of the language, the way it's poetic. The way she talks about the eye being able to move into the prologue and to dip into two different directions simultaneously.
Yahdon:
One of the things that I appreciated about her book about this journey that she's on is something that I constantly talk about in book club. And I think anybody who's been in book club long enough knows that...how can I say this? And several people said it in the meeting...how our parents or how we could intellectually understand that "everybody should be equal." And like, we should just accept people for how they are and intellectually we get that. But then in practice, how does that show up? Because it often doesn't, but, or I wouldn't say it doesn't, but it shows up in ways that complicates our understanding of how we assume things should look. Right? And I'm thinking about what you said, Gila about the sort of mixed signals, right? Like, okay. You can be, and you can do anything, but then don't cut your hair.
Yahdon:
I remember, you know, the mixed signal from my mother for example, having her tell me that "boys shouldn't cry. You're a man, you better stop crying." I was like, holy shit. I didn't think I was going to hear that from my moms and that, but then at the same time later when I didn't emote my mother's like, "what are you? So this doesn't effect you?" And I'm like, wait a minute. Like, what is happening right now? But then also my mother being in many ways, always serving as a model for like how I understand women's strength and like having to reconcile all of these different messages and say what do I take from this? And how do I apply what I believe about the world in my life.
Yahdon:
I'm gonna go to you, Jake. Just for decorum. If you want to comment at any point, use the raise your hand function, or you can type a exclamation in the chat. I wanted to jump in the back of the book on chapter 29, because I really feel like when Audre starts to navigate the world of lesbian culture there's all these politics that are at play that really illustrate and dramatize that paradox of people who you would think based on the sort of oppression they experience or intellectually or looking for some sort of freedom actually tend to exert the same sort of oppressive models of power that they're trying to escape. And I think about...
Yahdon:
So on page 220, "when I moved through the bunches of women, cruising each other in the front room or doing a slow fish on the dance floor, in the back with the smells of cigarette smoke and the music and the hair pomade whirling together like incense through charged air, it was hard for me to believe that my being an outsider had anything to do with being a lesbian. But when I, a Black woman, saw no reflection in any of the faces there week after week, I knew perfectly well that being an outsider in the Bagatelle had everything to do with being Black. The society within the confines of the Bagatelle reflected the ripples and eddies of the larger society that had spawned it, and which allowed the Bagatelle to survive as long as it did, selling watered-down drinks at inflated prices to lonely dykes who had no other social outlet or community gathering place.
Yahdon:
Rather than the idyllic picture created by false nostalgia, the fifties were really straight white america's cooling-off period of "let's pretend we're happy and that this is the best of all possible worlds and we'll blow those nasty commies to hell if they dare to say otherwise." And then she talked about, you know, jumping to page 21 real quick "for some of us, however, role-playing reflected all the depreciating attitudes towards women, which we loathed in straight society. It was a rejection of these roles that had drawn us to "the life" in the first place. Instinctively, without particular theory or political position or dialectic, we recognized oppression as oppression, no matter where it came from." And I just thought, going back and rereading this, and then watching the recent Chappelle special and recognizing something that I've even been looking at is if anybody has seen it, the way that his framework of inclusion around blackness excludes black people who are gay trans lesbian, queer, non-binary, and thinking about those politics, those very subtle politics of exclusion.
Yahdon:
But then at the same time, watch this dude talk about how Sojourner Truth was excluded from the politic of femininity in the 1800s, but not see his politic of blackness is equally exclusionary to black trans and gay people and lesbian people. And it was just like, yo, the cognitive dissonance in that moment. And just reading a book like this and thinking like how we can both intellectually believe that we are freeing ourselves, but then in practice, be perpetuating the same sort of oppressive structures that we claim that we're trying to destroy. And "it" being what I'm constantly doing in Book Club. And what I constantly want to do on our conversations is like, it's easy to get on the internet and be like, "oh, I stand with black lives and Asian people matter."
Yahdon:
"And I stand with.." but then it's like, what does that look like? How do you reconcile those sensibilities in your life and knowing that these are the things we believe, how do they show up and how do we reconcile very difficult, often feeling often contradictory beliefs against our actions. That's why I just thought this book was ill because it really was a confrontation of how does one believe the world should be. But then what does one do in this world, knowing that this world could be better, but do you always have sometimes the stamina to even go about doing that? What's at risk when you try to do those things, Jake it's on you.
Jake:
Yeah. That's crazy that you mentioned chapter 29 and Chappelle cause like I was going to make kind of the same comments on a different part of chapter 29 on 226. Uh, she briefly mentioned just, "it was a while before we came to realize that our place was the very house of difference, rather than the security of any one particular difference. And often we were cowards in our land." I only made it through the first half of the Chappelle thing, before I had to just turn it off. But he makes the joke about the fact that if black people had learned from gay people in their campaign for rights, then they'd be further along. But he says this in the midst of other comments that are clearly harmful to gay communities, to trans communities. And you can tell that he doesn't believe that.
Jake:
And I think that's been the big thing over the last couple of weeks is he, he genuinely believes that he's not ignorant to these things and that he is inclusive of people, but what it brought me back to and thinking about it, a lot of our comments as we went through the prompt is the level of progress that has been made. And there are obviously like improvements have been made in society of, we have better terminology for like gender identities. We have more communication about kind of dealing with mental health. Like, as Mike was mentioning about being in fashion, people like Pharrell and Kanye, did help kind of change that. But even our book club is somewhat narrow in the sense that you have to have a certain kind of mindset to want to come to this group. But we are more geographically kind of spread out.
Jake:
I guess my question is how do you think about whether progress is actually being made or progress is only being made in the narrow lens of what you're looking at? I don't have kids. So I don't know, if kids are going through the same on the playground, but just have new terms that parents don't understand. Forrest, you were talking about what you teach your kids. I don't know. It just feels like it's becoming harder and harder to track what's going on because especially the media that comes out is tailored to you by an algorithm. So you hear the things that you want to hear. And I don't know, it's just a broader question of how do people in the group actually think about tracking whether they believe something and they've seen it elsewhere,so progress has been made versus what we can read and look into.
Yahdon:
Before I open that up for that question. The one thing I want to highlight to the point of the Chappelle thing was also his inability to understand that multiple identities can exist at once. Right? And the notion of well, if Black people had moved like gay people did, we'd be free a long time ago, completely negating the fact that the principal organizer of the Montgomery boycott, the principal organizer of the "I have a dream speech" March on Washington was a gay Black man, Bayard Rustin. And the reason why his contributions are not even acknowledged is because he was gay. Like it was constant battle. Every time that, you know, they were doing things, they being SNCC and like all those different coalitions, the constant threat to them was they're going to expose the fact that Bayard Rustin is a sexual deviant, which was the language they use to describe him.
Yahdon:
It was this constant thing of like those respectability politics. And with this comes a way to just to address your question, Jake is what becomes the metric for progress, right? What becomes the price of that progress? If you think about a lot of what the civil rights movement had to do, which contextually in its time makes sense. So it's not about saying this was a failure of that movement because it was like, no, that movement operated in a very particular construct where you were still fighting to have heteronormative black people seen as human beings. So while it's easy in this present moment to say they should have him included him in that, from that vantage point, at that time, it's like they did what they believed they needed to do to be able to advocate for a certain type of humanity that would be recognized globally.
Yahdon:
And to some extent it worked. At the same time, what was the woman name, who, before they picked Rosa Parks? She was, I think it was the woman. She was a teenager who was, she got pregnant with a child out of wedlock. And they were originally going to use her for the bus boycott. But when he found out she had a child out of wedlock, they were like, we can't use her. Right. So, you know, there was a lot of strategy about the sort of politics of respectability and the politics of, we need to make sure that these, you know, that white people largely understand us as human. And then what becomes the price of that humanity. So when you're marking progress, based on the notion...Claudette Colvin (is her name), thank you, Naana.
Yahdon:
What becomes the metric for which progress is measured. We tend to talk about that a lot. What becomes the language for which we ask for progress? What does fighting for one's rights look like when those rights also demand that certain people can't be their full selves in order for like...and this has been like the long swell of time of.. Even if you look at our constitution..black men got the right to vote before white women who like, it was constantly like a one at a time in terms of the theoretical framework of one identity at a time, as opposed to, what does it look like to create an intersectional politic where you're granting multiple bodies freedom at the same time versus ok, black men, then but by black men, we mean heterosexual men or, and so that concept of progress becomes about who aligns themselves most with the construct of patriarchal white capitalist society and who is further from that proximity and the people who, and in marking progress, my understanding....
Yahdon:
And if anybody wants to answer this, you're free to, is that progress is marked by how much people assimilate into a white patriarchal power structure. And so I never forget at Pace university, I forgot what dude gave a speech, but his mark of progress was the fact that in 1952, like 10% of households had air conditioners. And now like 80% of households air condition, I was like, what the? That's your metric for progress? I was like, oh, this dude is bugging. But based on his metric, that's progress to him, but it just said so much. So then that means that there's certain things that just won't even register. if your measure of progress is material, then that becomes in some ways...it sets his own trajectory for what you have a capacity to understand and what just completely aligned to your understanding. Does anybody else want to answer Jake's question in terms of progress? Kirsten, I'll let you jump in on it.
Kirsten:
So I think I'm going to come at it from a different angle. I think that, and this could often be looked at as a bit of a cop out, especially in political circles or political oriented circles, but I still would stand by it. I think that the truest progress, the only true progress that we can really track is within, it's only within ourselves. And I think that the way that that's tracked, um, within ourselves and how we engage with the world is how we communicate, and how that starts is how we communicate with ourselves. So how much we are reflecting on what we feel and what we're going through, and challenge our assumptions and grow. And I think that that's, what's so interesting about this book, both you and Jake, Yahdon had pointed to some really beautiful parts about intersectionality towards the end of the book.
Kirsten:
That, to me felt like these stronger sentiments, these more conclusive sentiments, but what I also really enjoyed and I thought was so brilliant in how she executed it, was you see throughout the book and I'm trying to bring up some pages, but, you see it blossom. So you see her own sort of consciousness about her own intersectionality, her own experience in the world and the sort of first glimmers of insights around it. There's this one line where she's, she says...I wrote these things down, give me one second..
Yahdon:
Do you want to take a beat to find it? Let me just touch somebody else and then come back to you.
Kirsten:
I'll just say it was, there was one line about... Yeah, let me take a beat and come back.
Yahdon:
Maria then Maggie.
Maria:
Um, yeah, I was actually going to approach this because it's something I've actually discussed before in a context of human rights work. One of the things that's very hard when you're dealing with different identities is that sometimes you'll have someone who is both a victim of oppression and an oppressor at the same time, when you're doing that kind of work, it's sort of like, how do you navigate giving that person space and voice as someone who has been oppressed and who we need to witness their oppression and how it has happened with also acknowledging that parts of their speeches are in themselves, oppressive to other groups. And it's very difficult especially when you're dealing with, in certain religions contexts where rights of women and other religions are not always respected, but that religion is being politically prosecuted in that context. And I think that's something that, in the West we sometimes forget that this notion of progress, it is a notion that is created by the White West and by these values that we have and it's uni-directional, but that's not how it actually manifests itself in the world because, progress for certain groups may lead to progress, to show losses for other people.
Maria:
It's always like finding ways to navigate that balance. So you may want to protect freedom of speech and freedom of religion in certain areas of the world. While at the same time also protecting the rights of women not being taken away from school and navigating kind of... It's those values the way I think sometimes we think about them in the West is that they're always going to compliment itself, but no, they're always in conflict. And it is through dialogue that you resolve those conflicts. And in finding ways of recognizing how our own speech may lead to different types of oppression. I think that as a society, it's an ongoing conversation of how you navigate those and where the line is. And each person has their own morality of how that sort of conflict of values is resolved.
Maria:
And that's why it's so hard in such a complex society that we have now to measure progress as this one thing. So I think rather than thinking about progress as a society, as this all or nothing, it's easier to look at honestly, dignity. Is this action that I'm taking enhancing someone's dignity and their ability to participate in the conversation that we're having. And at least for me, that's how I found it. That to me has helped me ease a little bit in how to navigate that conversation.
Yahdon:
Damn, that was... Shit. Y'all see a pattern.? It's always the people when they come to their first meet and they just be like, "I'm coming at y'all, it's my first meeting." That that was brilliant. That was brilliant. Thank you, Maggie.
Maggie:
I almost don't want to go after that, but I like that as far as we do, we kind of, I don't know, I've been on the west coast for so long, and I've been spending more time in the Midwest again, where I'm from. And I just, this again sounded utterly simplistic, but I just more and more going off of what you just said, Maria, more and more as like the unidirectional, like America is not one country we can say that it is, but it is just not. And so what is progress where I am now as opposed to progress where I was last week, or what is progress in New York, as opposed to, you know, uh, a town in downstate Illinois or Paducah, Kentucky, what does an intersectionality look like there? You know, what are the confrontations that lead to progress there?
Maggie:
What's the definition of progress there. It could just be a job, you know. it's just sort of hit me. I don't have any solutions for it, but, it's just sort of hit me that I think we need in this country a new way of talking about ourselves as if we are one people. Um, again, we are all equal, but we do not have all, we do not have equal experiences. We do not have equal environments and we do not have equal context for the macro micro of this world.
Yahdon:
So wait, Jules on you, yourdrop your hand? or did you mean to drop your hand?
Jules:
I guess I'd just like to voice that and this sort of gets at I think a direction Maggie was going, but I'm really uncomfortable with the framing of progress. Like partly because it feels so relative and partly it feels so like incremental, you know what Audre is talking about, what she models and in this book I feel like is, is revolutionary. It's liberatory. It shows such a different way of being in the world especially, at a time when, there weren't any models or very few. She talked about in the same chapter, you know, how rare it was to see other queer Black people in that bar and then to not even look at each other in the eye because they didn't want to see the loneliness of themselves. My point is I'm, I'm really like, why progress? I guess I'd be curious to understand maybe what's the underlying sentiment or behind that question, because I don't. Yeah,
Yahdon:
Well, it seems like Jake clarified it, and Jake, you can speak to it. You want to clarify what you meant? .
Jake:
Yeah. I mean, I think as, as we were talking about it, I think Kirsten said that progress is within ourselves and how we engage with the world. And Brandon had said (in the chat), "I'm glad we're in this Book Club." And just part of me though, thinks that a lot of our comments early on had a positive tone of like, things gotten better than where they were when were kids. And I guess my question is, how do we avoid this sense of false progress? Thinking there's more progress than there is when in reality, people say we're more connected across the world than ever, but I think we're more connected into like-minded thoughts than ever like we're in a group where we're all across the country, but we're all similar, I think fairly similarly minded on a lot of topics, we agree on things we're people who would show up to a Book Club that gives you ties automatically to come into this.
Jake:
You think about social media, you either see bots or you're following people that you followed because they have similar interests to you. The news sources, you either read, it's polarizing news sources, you're reading left, or right-wing, there's not anything in the middle. And so, Maggie mentioned she's in Chicago, like Midwest, and then the west coast. I've only lived in two liberal cities, Seattle and New York. And so, like, I don't really know what the South is like outside of whichever type of bias newsfeed I read, or like some bots that show up. And so, I'm not going to assume everyone in the South, only will tolerate white people and straight white men and Christian White men. You can't make that assumption based on what's going on. But all I'm saying is I think there seems to be more and more cloudiness of how we actually monitor progress. And maybe not, maybe that's just how it's always been. But I think just being comfortable with not having this false sense of progress is kind of where I was coming from.
Yahdon:
Jules, you can jump back in.
Jules:
Well, I really appreciate the clarification. And also that last point, cause the idea of progress sort of sets up a linear frame and leaves this suggestion that...it's not unidirectional. Um, and it is all relative. And so, anyway, just to say that.
Yahdon:
What I was going to highlight... So coming back to that page, right? That page 226, um, not even before that, going into 224, like "For 400 years in this country, Black women have been taught to view each other with deep suspicion. It was no different in the gay world. Most Black lesbians were closeted correctly recognizing the Black community's lack of interest in our position, as well as the many more immediate threats to our survival as Black people in a racist society. It was hard enough to be Black, to be Black and female, to be Black female and gay, to be black female gay and out of the closet in a white environment, even to the extent of dancing in the Bagatelle, was considered by many Black lesbians to be simply suicidal. And if you were fool enough to do it, you'd better come on so tough that nobody messed with you. I often felt put down by their sophistication, their clothes, their manners, their cars and their femmes."
Yahdon:
The part where she talks about that moment that Jake, you bring up, I don't want to read the thing, but the Black gay girls on page 226 in the village, "The Black gay-girls in the Village gay bars of the fifties knew each other's names, but we seldom looked into each other's Black eyes, lest we see our own aloneness and our own blunted power mirrored in the pursuit of darkness. Some of us died inside the gaps between the mirrors and those turned-away eyes." And I think if there's any way that if I'm thinking about progress, because I recognized that even a lot of the prompts, what I recognize is there's ways in which we internalize oppression. But seldom I realized this personally, do any of the prompts, ask how we perpetuate oppression?
Yahdon:
Like when is the moment we police somebody's body in the very way that we were policed. Right. And I think progress, if I'm thinking about it, based on this conversation is what language do we have to recognize when we're an oppressor? Because I see in this country that we live in and even like, you know, dramatized through a Dave Chappelle, but even in this book is looking at Audre Lord, think about how much of the book in which she's recognizing and she's taking on these oppressive structures, but then how much of the book is dedicated to when she's perpetuating is these structures. Having a language for when you're an aggressor doesn't really exist in that same sort of, there's not that much language for like, how do we be fucking up? The ability to recognize how do we perpetuate a system that we are a part of and recognize our agency and that perpetuation, I think that progress lies in this particular context of this country, of the narratives that sustain the oppression that we currently witness.
Yahdon:
Right? Like thinking about Dave Chappelle's language, one of the reasons why he could continue to tell himself that he was a victim is because he was constantly approximating himself to white people who have more power than him, but what would that stand up look like if he had to look at the power he had as a heterosexual black man in relationship to black trans and gay and lesbian people, it would, it would change the entire special a different conversation now. I'm thinking now, just based on what you're saying, that the ability to recognize when as quickly as to Maria's point, you can be oppressed, that you can perpetuate that oppression is like, what language do we have to recognize that moment when it's like, holy shit, I just did to you what was done to me?
Yahdon:
And usually the defense mechanism is, well, that was done to me. So we're defending ourselves against any sort of critical self-awareness about what happens when we adopt attitude of a society that we claim we're trying to upend. So I think that would be my definition of progress is like, what language do you have to recognize when you're an oppressor? And what do you do at that point of recognition? Do you continue to double down on that or do you find a way to undo that? Uh, Lise it's on you cause you had been going and then Andrea next,
Lise:
I think to your point, Yahdon, and this is going back a little bit to, you know, for thinking about language and the way that we can define, the oppressed or how we define progress. I'm thinking about instead of a linearity kind of, um, a concentric circle and kind of, as progress...
Lise:
As progress sort of radiates out, it, it ripples out and it can ripple out in multiple directions and, that rippling out becomes, an increased space for multiple conversations. And I think what is so radical about this book is that Audre Lord to Jules' point was writing this without references, without that support, without that those markers or even the language for the multiple ways in which she existed. Now, we have a new and increasing and a rippling out language for having these more...and I hate to say "inclusive spaces", but the progress is measured in this sort of like, imagine like these concentric circles sort of moving out and I'm thinking about it with my own kid and the ways in which, she, they, navigate their own identity. I mean, she's young, she's nine.
Lise:
But she has a more expansive sort of awareness in some ways of the world, because she hasn't been hemmed in by the shit that she's been taught, by the people who've come before her and the people who've been taught the conventions of history or whatever it is. So for me, I'm looking at this nine-year-old and recognizing all the progress in them. And that's only because they haven't been hemmed in that those concentric circles continue to radiate out instead of being measured by this line of...we started here and we're going here. She has no sense of that. For her it's, it's, it's all in here until I'm told that those circles have to stop moving out.
Yahdon:
I have a question for you, but I'm going to go to Andrea first. I'm going to come back,
Lise:
I just want to say too, I'm going to have to hop off in a minute. Cause that same little kid is all up around me right now, but I'll put it in the thing when I have to hop off.
Yahdon:
Okay, cool. Andrea it's on you.
Andrea:
Um, so you were talking about the idea of the oppressed and the oppressor. And it made me think about not in the book, but I ride my bike through the city a lot. And there's a lot of moments where I'm on my bike and following the rules of the road and doing what I'm supposed to do, where somebody will do something to me, but then will get very mad at me. Like a good example is the other day I'm in the bike lane. It's one of those like green bike lanes separated from traffic and a car, took an illegal turn and hit me. And I started cursing him out. He started cursing me out. And I, I remember reflecting on that later and thinking, I didn't really one, I obviously didn't give them an avenue to like approach me in any other way. Like I immediately jumped, I was hit, so I was mad. Um, but he immediately came out, like F you forget you like, like, it's your fault, I'm a car. Like, you should be looking...
Andrea:
And I mean, he is right. He wins that battle. Like there's a dynamic in terms of me on a bike in the car, but I realized he didn't have any language to say, I'm so sorry. I was in the wrong. You did have right of way. I shouldn't have made that turn. I didn't look. I was thinking about the number of times though that I'm on my bike where I will try to pass someone who's going a little too slow. I think I can make the light. And I'm definitely in the wrong. And I many times, if I collide with someone in the heat of the moment, I don't always express that I'm wrong. All of this was to say in reading the book, there was little violences throughout the entire book that I kept seeing when that oppressor/oppression moment would happen and, or just different dynamics, like there's one where she talks about being on the roof.
Andrea:
She talks about being on the roof and there's a boy who, who wants to slide his Dick in between her. And then she goes home and thinks she's pregnant. And she gets beat by her mom for being late. She was in an unsafe environment, was cornered by this boy and then came home because she was off schedule. She was just getting it from all angles and all of this to say is, so much of those power dynamics were expressed in violence big and small and she would move through them so quickly in the book. It would happen in a couple of moments and then she'd be immediately off of it. It was just like a part of her life. And I think about how much it's so part of our lives, we have these little violences that we just move through in our days and sometimes as the actor and sometimes as the acted upon
Yahdon:
Kirsten, I know you had your hand raised.
Kirsten:
Yeah. You know, now I'm deciding, I think I want to respond to, to Andrea's comment, because it also allows us to pivot ever so slightly with talking about her mother. And, there's one part and this, I do have the page number 101,
Kirsten:
And it's also, this is relevant just to the full discussion on, being aware of how you're oppressing or inflicting violence. I think so much of it, we're so unaware of that, because half the time, we're not even aware of when it's happening to us on that micro level and where it comes from as kids, it's because it sort of dredges up those ugly emotions, or manufactured emotions of like shame. And so it's "oh, I don't want to feel that way." But the one part, oh, it was after, after Genevieve died and she comes home and her mother's making her tea and towards the bottom of 101, she says, "I'll fix you some tea. You mustn't be upset too much by all this, dear heart. My mother turned, rubbing the edge of the tea strainer dry over and over again."
Kirsten:
"Look, my darling child. I know she was your friend and you feel bad, but this is what I've been cautioning you about. Be careful who you go around with. Among-you children do different things in this place and you think we stupid. But this old head of mine, I know what I know. There was something totally wrong there from the start, you mark my words. That man call himself father was using that girl for I don't know what.The merciless quality of my mother's fumbling insights turned her attempt at comfort into another assault. As if her harshness could confer invulnerability upon me. As if in the flames of truth as she saw it, I could eventually be forged into some pain-resistant replica of herself." I feel like that's so relevant to this because half the time, we don't even want to feel our own pain, let alone be conscious of the pain we inflict on anybody else. And, and that's something we learn like, your parents never want to see you hurting? And so a lot of times, like, I know my dad did the same exact thing. If I was hurting, he'd be so angry that I was hurt that he launched into attack. And it didn't really help me understand what I was feeling, you know, accept what I was feeling. Not approve of it, but accepted and learn how to transmute it and move on. I think that's definitely critical to all this.
Yahdon:
Right. Something to your point though, right? I think those are the words you use where you said, like inflict pain. Maybe that wasn't the verb. I don't know. But one of the things I've been thinking about, we've been talking about language, and something, I think personally, not speaking for anyone in this Book Club, and you can resist this if it doesn't apply to you. Like, I think that when I think about what Jake said about what makes us, in some ways like-minded in this Book Club, is the books, or like maybe a worldview, and I've sort of seen what brings us together as this particular care and investment around language. Just like words, how we'll use them, how they can be used, how just changing this word with that word changes the entire thing.
Yahdon:
I say all that to say that the reason why I'm deliberately choosing the word, perpetuate oppression versus inflict is because what inflict does is it creates this sort of linear thing of like, it's like the infliction starts with us as opposed to perpetuation is about how we in our individual way is still connected to something larger. So it's not about individually, oh, here's how I inflict harm, but perpetuate harm. Meaning like it's a simultaneity of identity. It's not like one happens. And then the other it's one is informing how the other occurs. Just thinking as an everybody's talking, I'm just thinking about..
Yahdon:
In the long narrative of progress in this country, right? You have you being, any of us were in this, like this Western white American context about progress and success and those things, and the whole narrative around, the Irish, the Italian, anytime someone wants to talk about success and progress in this country, it rests on this notion of "here's where I was" and "here's where I am now." Or "here's the hardship I had to deal with. And here's the absence of that same hardship." Right? And I'm thinking about in those same stories, right? How, when you look at any group's advancement in this country, it came at the expense of perpetuating systems that that same group would recognize limited their ability to thrive and survive. And, but yet there is for no culture and I'm in this country because American culture is the dominant culture.
Yahdon:
I've been finding it, fascinating to watch black American people at this juncture and several different points sound more or less like white Americans when it comes to certain issues, just the length, the defensive postures, the comparative suffering, just different ways in which "well, why is this person? We went through this and we had that." And I'm like, this sounds very eerie. I keep coming back to that Chappelle special shit. Cause it was just like, yo, this dude sounds like a white dude. When he talks about his friend, Daphne who's the white trans woman, his use of her was like, yo, if this was a white dude talking about his black friend, he woulda got booed and I'm like, it's the same playbook. And yet this is getting applauded. And I'm like, yo, this shit is wild. And it was just very eerie to witness that and think, you know, I think about that scene in star wars, episode three, where Natalie Portman's character was queen Amidala when the siths took over?
Yahdon:
And he was like, "we basically bout to make this a totalitarian regime, y'all" and everybody uploaded. And she was like, "so this is how democracy dies with thunderous applause." And I just thought about that moment, because I think about that moment often in my own life where I was like, "when is there a moment where I think I'm like the hero in this moment and I'm really a villain?" And I think that what I'm doing, all my justifications are only enabling me to perpetuate this harm. Right. So the last thing I'll share is in language, right? There's this show on Netflix called, Hate Thy Neighbor. That's the name of it and I'm gonna type it in the chat, it's on Netflix.
Yahdon:
And it's this documentary where this comedian is from, I think London. He comes to America and he interviews different hate different groups, the Nazis, Black Israelites, uh, just different people. And what was fascinating about every group he interviewed, they had the most hate, like homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, racist views. But when you ask them, if they were racist in case of the Nazis, they will say, no, if you ask, you know, the Israelites, if they were homophobic or antisemitic, they would say no. And it was fascinating how, they could articulate everything that they believed with vitriol, but then you asked them, do you hate these people? They say no. And then thinking about Nazis, I mean the third Reich, and when you ask these people, did they do what they did in terms of, you know, mass extermination of people?
Yahdon:
They said, no, we were doing our jobs. And it's like, there is really no language where someone was like "yeah, I killed those people. I did it because I hate them." And it's fascinating. Just in human history, what language has there been to recognize that we perpetuate harm? And I constantly see that there's very little language to go, oh. There's very little language for what accountability looks like in real time. There's always, "well, I mean, I did that, but this was done to me." It's always a way to like, "I'm still really the victim here." And this meeting in itself has been giving me more and more of what I challenged myself to do personally. If I think that I'm the hero in this moment it's like, which way, could I fathom that this might not be playing out the way I think it is.
Yahdon:
And that has challenged me to your point, Kristin in terms of language is like, I just talk less because I have to think, what language do I already have at the ready to offer that may very well be allowing me to drive down a path that I say I don't want to continue to drive down. So the justifications that I have and the slogans and the catchphrases...There was an interview with Jaleel white and Talib Kweli and they were talking and Jaleel White made a comment about OJ. And then Talib said, "oh, you see how they did OJ."
Yahdon:
And it was a Black woman sitting off camera, if anybody watches this show. And she was like, "how they did him? How he did her" referring to Nicole. And it was interesting in that exchange, how Talib Kweli proceeds with who the victim was in that moment and how she understood the victim. And they're all talking about the same person. And it's like OJ after murdering two people. I mean, legally, you can't say that, but I believe that the man did that. How based on who you perceive the victim to be, what you then see about that situation. And so it just, it constantly just creates for me this challenge of, to your point, Kirstin of, what language do I have to recognize when I can simultaneously be a victim of oppression while also perpetuating it in the same gesture and what language do I have for that? And that's why, like, I spend a great deal of time. That's why I picked the books I pick because I'm looking for ways in which we can recognize those points of intersection and simultaneity. How do we cultivate that language and these conversations?
Kirsten:
Just a thing too, while you were talking, it made me think, you know, perpetuate is, is more reflective of inherit and pass on to, and that's of course, much more accurate. And then when you were bringing up the OJ thing, it's who do you identify with? And when you're perpetuating something, if you admit to perpetuating well, then that also in most cases means that you have to indict your family, or have to indict your country. And I think that's where it gets very tricky too. People don't want to, you know,
Yahdon:
Indict their people. Yeah. Errol, on you.
Errol:
Yea, that's actually an interesting point. There was a news story that came out recently that talked almost exactly about this how language frames, if you're the victim of the oppressor. I forget his name,(Kyle Rittenhouse) but he murdered two protesters during the Black Lives Matter protests. And the judge just made a declaration that "you're not allowed to call the murdered or three people he shot victims. But I will allow you to call them rioters or anarchists if you can, if you can back it up." But he said, "you're not allowed to refer to them as victims."
Yahdon:
mmhmm . Kristin
Kristin:
I've also been thinking a lot about, in talking and having these conversations about the ways in which we perpetuate aggression, we call people out a lot, but do we also have a language to try and have conversations where we're not shaming each other? Because I think sometimes part of that is this justification of, well, "this is why I did this, because this has been done to me." If people are hurting or have been hurt, and then can't really deal with looking at themselves as an aggressor, as an oppressor, because it's almost too difficult because of the pain that they've been through. I wonder if also, we also need to build language that holds people accountable, but doesn't also shame them at the same time.
Yahdon:
Right. Let me ask you a question, Kristen, can I ask you a question? ("Oh, yes, please.") I'm interested based on what you're saying about the language that calls people in. What I am curious about is, if you could maybe just answer this for yourself is like, what language do you have to hold yourself accountable when it's like, you're fucking up? "Oh, here's where I could have done X, but I did Y." Because to the point is like, what I constantly see in the culture we live in is, it's easy to go, "oh, this person is fucking up and that person's fucking up." Or even in the call-in culture, it's always outside of the self. Right. But then it's like, what does that language look like when it's like, how do you hold yourself accountable?
Yahdon:
When you recognize that you are not necessarily aligned or you're just not where you would want to be in your own framework. And so, the thing I want to just offer before you answer, is that, when I read this book, thinking about love languages and like, particularly thinking about love in a romantic notion as opposed to one that is more challenging. And to see that whereas one, I can imagine, can look at like her critiques of white lesbians and Black lesbians, and where they fail, that critique can look like an absence of love, but I've been looking at it through the lens of like, that is what the presence of love can do is acknowledge the way in which like this thing that we are creating is not perfect.
Yahdon:
And yet it's still ours to continue to attempt to try to like improve, but in this country and in this culture, that sort of way of talking gets received as, "oh, you must hate this thing. Or you must not like this thing" as opposed to what if this is an expression of love, like the ability to recognize like, "oh, this is not doing what it could be doing or I'm not doing what I could have done" that ability to even see that is an act of love. Whereas in our culture, that act of criticism is seen as, you must not like this. What you said just made me think.. cause I was at first going, "oh, we're not talking about the beautiful parts of the book where the love is present."
Yahdon:
But that is love, present. Like to have the compassion, to be able to contextualize the way in which Black women treated each other in this environment. It wasn't like, she was just saying like "Black women are mean to each other." She was like, given the context, these Black women are only going to show up in a way that, we showed up with each other giving context. And that was a way of saying, I could see now what I wasn't able to see then. So that sentence where she talks about, "some of us died inside the gaps between the mirrors and those turned away eyes " does she even write that sentence if she didn't live in that moment where she turned away?
Yahdon:
So while it's easy to talk about, how we should always look, where do we arrive at language that acknowledges what gets lost when we don't? And I'm just in this moment, in the midst of this conversation, just thinking differently about..wow, even sometimes the way I might talk about love or the way I think about what is seen as loving or tender or whatever is often about what comes, what can be more comforting and convenient as opposed to like inconvenience. It could also be, but like inconvenience is love too. Or like, love can be often inconvenient because it's asking you to do something that challenges the core of who you believe you are. Anybody else wanna go, we got 12 minutes left.
Kirsten:
I will respond :laughs:. I will talk again. Cause this reminds me of the quote that I couldn't find. I still haven't found. I didn't find it but I remember it enough. It's sort of reflective of what you're saying. I think it's about grace, right? On both sides of the equation. Like for if you are being taught or if you are teaching, there's an element, especially if you are teaching, there's an element of grace that takes the lesson so much farther, so much more quickly. And I think cancel culture, is just lacking that often. And the quote was, um, she's (Audre) talking about these different conversations, that are basically intersectionality and it's more early on in the book. There's more of like an optimism about it. And she says like, "the lessons we learned were not lessened by the ones we hadn't yet."
Yahdon:
No, hold on, you gotta do like a black Baptist preacher. You got to read that again. You got to slow it down.
Kirsten:
The lessons we learned, were not lessened by the ones we hadn't yet.
Yahdon:
What page is this on? I got to see this.
Kirsten:
I don't know why! I haven't like...
Yahdon:
I got to see it written. Can we just spend the remaining, can we just unpack that
Kirsten:
I know it was a good one. Now I'm wondering if it was a figment of my imagination. Cause I've looked through three times.
Yahdon:
Does anybody want to take a stab at...Eunice? You found it?
Eunice:
Hold on. I just searched for the lessons we learn in the kindle and you can kind of copy it and find out where the hell you're at. Right. That's what I do. Hold on. Let's see. Uh, right here, we might be talking about 179. Look at page 179, somewhere around there.
Kirsten:
It was two pages before. Oh my gosh. Yeah. "However Imperfectly, We tried to build a community of sorts where we could at the very least, survive within a world we correctly perceived to be hostile to us; we talked endlessly about how to best create that mutual support, which 20 years later was being discussed in the women's movement as a brand new concept. Lesbians were probably the only Black and white women in New York City in the fifties who were making any real attempt to communicate with each other; we learned lessons from each other, the values of which were not lessened by what we did not learn." So that's funny that it actually was not earlier in the book that I thought, but sort of marks the start of that arc, that 40, 50 page arc that dives so deep into intersectionality, but there's grace there
Yahdon:
I'm still trying to understand what the hell is going on in the sentence, just grammatically. I'm trying to figure it out. Like, what is this? How would you distill it? Does anybody want to just break this down for me?
Kristin:
I think it's they learned from each other and then maybe they didn't even see the value of what was happening at the time, but that didn't make what they learned from each other, any less impactful or poignant or...
Yahdon:
It's that last clause that's getting me the values of which we're not lessened by what we did not. That's the shit that's like,
Kirsten:
well think about what she says right before, you know, it says "lesbians were probably the only Black and white women in New York City in the fifties who were making any real attempts to communicate with one another." And she talks so much about, of course there were differences that you felt like she couldn't even communicate even among the lesbian community, because she would feel that she had ruffled feathers or I forget the exact phrase phrase she used saying, like, we still found a sisterhood, even if I could not talk about how being Black was different, that for being lesbian and Black,
Yahdon:
I understand what she's saying. That them not knowing what they didn't know, didn't prevent them from learning something new. Yeah, I get that. I get that. I get that. Okay. All right. That's a bar. Maria, it's on you.
Maria:
Thanks. I think one of the things I really liked about this passage too, is that, to me, highlights on all the things that I suppose the most powerful in the book is her account of community and what that really means. And it's the common struggle of learning, how to occupy a space and despite our differences with each other. And I think the problem was analogizing, this sort of feeling to what we have now as a brother community, especially when you bringing social media where literally anyone can participate, is that community something that to this day, no one has found a way to replicate in larger settings. There is a biological limit actually to the number of people that you can be in community with, that our brains just can't really grasp that. The kind of intimacy, that I think is required for the trust that that relationship needs for you to be able to be there and fuck up together and keep building it.
Maria:
And I think what she says about this, what they learned, isn't less valuable because there were things that they couldn't yet talk about and that they didn't yet have the language for. I think that's a very valuable lesson because it allows us room for mistake. But I think also as a larger society, to me, I still see the value in cancel culture, I guess, because we're not dealing with a smaller community in that sense. We're just dealing with people in the world, out there talking at each other more than struggling together. And so I think in those contexts there is value. And there's also, self-love in not hearing and in not inviting those people in necessarily because they may, because there's just no way of building community with them, I guess.
Yahdon:
Oh. Or another way of saying is we just haven't discovered the way that that community can look right? Like, because we're also like privileging, like, you know, sometimes what she even said, right. She said that they created language for communities that people thought were new, that they had built back then. Right. So like what we might find out about, almost like finding out about an artist eight years after they came out is like, they're new to you. They're not new, period. Right? You just found out about it. So there's all these different frameworks and ways in which we might think that this just existed. And it's like, no, that's been around. We just wasn't exposed to it yet. And that ability to recognize how sometimes like, things are happening in simultaneity, but we have a limited framework to just experience all the different things that are occurring in the world at the same time, which then undermines that whole notion of a linear sense of progress, because that would then necessitate that certain people are moving. We're all moving on one unified time clock versus there's different times. Literally it's a different time zone, which is very different than just like the hour of the day, but how people even experience their movement through time and space is different. So, yeah, I was just saying it to say that notion of the things we think may or may not exist is all contingent upon what we have access to. Mike, I'm gonna let you take us home with the last comment brother, man.
Mike:
No, I was just going to bring some language. I've learned a lot. There's a lot to think about tonight for sure. But, on page 81, chapter 12, that was something that I highlighted throughout the book. And it stood out to me through our conversation, cause it said, "But we never ever talked about what it meant and felt like to be Black and white, and the effects that had on our being friends. Of course, everybody with any sense, deplored racial discrimination, theoretically and without discussion. We could conquer it by ignoring. I had grown up in such an isolated world that it was hard for me to recognize difference as anything other than a threat, because it usually was." And then at the top of the page, she says "At St. Catherine's, they said, "Be sisters in the presence of strangers," and they meant non-catholics. In high school, the girls said, "Be sisters in the presence of strangers," And they meant men. My friends said, "Be sisters in the presence of strangers," and they meant the squares. But in high school, my real sisters were strangers; my teachers were racists; and my friends were that color I was never supposed to trust.
Yahdon:
BARS. This woman can write, man. Damn!
Mike:
That was just something that I highlighted because it really encapsulated all of the discussion that was had tonight, which was very insightful, but it just puts language to, everything that was said, but like her struggle with identity and fitting in, and who's an enemy and who's a friend based off the context. I guess someone could be an enemy or a friend depending on, what the position and the context says. I feel like that was what we were talking about today
Yahdon:
you came in at the right time, cause you gave this meeting a bow. Like it's always good when you have open-ended existential conversations. Like the ones we have, you need somebody to be like, "yeah"
Mike:
You got the words. I could just come in with some highlights, you know.
Yahdon:
So the punctuation, you know, boom exclamation point. So this concludes our meeting for October. Thank you all for contributing to it. we got to do the Littest members, Maria came in, knitting and multitasking and she just dropping science. Eunice lit for finding that page, Kristin and Kiersten lit for not giving up on that quote. Cause that quote definitely opened something up, you know. Mike for definitely bringing this home, Jake with the questions. So many people who just brought so much, even Andrea just providing that opportunity to exercise critical self-reflection. What are the ways in which I'm that person? When am I "that guy," right? When am I the person I don't necessarily recognize because that person looks like me now. Right. Just Lit members all around. All right. So let's get this picture with this book.
Yahdon:
Hold on one second. 1, 2, 3. All right, cool. We got it. All right. Y'all ready for the next book club pick? So November we going into November, I was thinking about, conversations and how we deepen our understanding of the culture and the world we live in, but getting new language to talk about things. And I just got hung up on, you know, when I introduced Zami before I picked that moment in the beginning of the book when, Audre Lorde talks about that white woman who in Staten island jumps into her car, running from this white man trying to harm her.
Yahdon:
And then when she sees she's Black, she jumps out and she goes, I drove off knowing she would probably die being stupid. One of the things I've been really trying to do both as a person who deals a lot with languages, some of the language we are used to talking about this power structure in. And so for this month, we're going to be talking about, the book is entitled "Dying of Whiteness: how the politics of racial resentment is killing America's Heartland" And the reason why I wanted to pick this book, is because something I've been doing personally is finding different ways to talk about whiteness. Anybody who has taken that whiteness class, Jules, Andrew, you know, that's what we did in that class, but anybody who's been in Book Club know that, part of what it means to disrupt power structures is about giving that power structure, different kinds of language so that we can see it in a different way so that we can not take for granted. Some of the things that we often take for granted just by the language we use to describe it. So I'm just going to read an element of it because, what the book is basically saying is that while, many people would talk about whiteness as this thing.
Yahdon:
So here it is. This is in the introduction, this man is spitting. "So the tea party, the alt-right and the populism of Donald Trump seems to signal a marked shift in the course of American history and hastened, the downfall of what remains of white conservative political traditions of compromise. In the words of writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, "Trump then became the first white president as a result." The results are potentially catastrophic. I've come to believe and argue in this book that playing to white anxieties has implications beyond whipping up the base against immigrants, liberals, and minorities. When politics demands that people resist available healthcare, amass arsenals, cut funding for schools that their own kids attend or make other decisions that might feel emotionally correct, but are biologically perilous. These politics are literally asking people to die for their whiteness, living in a state or a country or a nation dominated by a politics of racial resentment then becomes a diagnosable quantifiable and increasingly mortal pre-existing condition."
Yahdon:
This is page 18. So this book, you know, in the ways in which we talk about these systems and what I've constantly seen in the broader discourse about whiteness is constantly giving whiteness this positioning of something to aspire towards something, to assimilate, to something, to achieve. And finding books that figure out ways to disrupt our notions of what we are... like alter the course of trajectories that are ultimately going to lead to our demise. How do we alter these trajectories towards something that does allow us to live and the world we say we want to live in? So this book is the book for November "Dying of Whiteness". Thank y'all again for another month.