via:
Saturday, February 24, 2024
Teen Subcultures Are Fading (Pity the Poor Kids).
A few weeks ago, my 12-year-old daughter showed me a video created by a Dallas clothing store called Dear Hannah Prep, depicting a girl’s first time visiting “the preppiest boutique in Texas.” “How excited are you?” an off-camera voice asks. “I’m so excited!” the girl says. Then she opens the door, gasps and declares, “It’s so preppy in here!”
That this moment had become a meme, spawning an array of other videos riffing on the original (we see the girl enter a derelict classroom or padded cell and swoon, each time, that it’s “so preppy in here”) was far less confusing to me than the fact that people were calling this store — an all-white box exploding with smiley-face sweatshirts, tie-dyed fuzzy bathrobes and a generally berserk neon beachiness — preppy.
“That,” I told my daughter, “is not preppy.” I did not have much hope of persuading her that millions of teenagers on TikTok were wrong and her 50-year-old mother — who does, in fact, own a copy of Lisa Birnbach’s 1980 “The Official Preppy Handbook” — was right, but it seemed worth trying. I looked around her room, and for lack of any stray loafers or rumpled chinos to use as examples, I touched the top of an antique oak dresser that was once her grandmother’s. “This is preppy,” I said. She rolled her eyes: “Mom, that dresser is super cottagecore, and that is not my aesthetic at all.”
My daughter’s “preppy” is not my idea of preppy — the prep of actual New England prep schools, of frayed Oxford cloth and WASPy noblesse oblige. Nor is it the aspirational varsity style of Tommy Hilfiger and 1990s rappers in rugby shirts, or even J. Crew’s self-conscious 2010s update on old-money style. Those meanings haven’t vanished; a great deal has been written about them lately, much of it connected to Avery Trufelman’s erudite series “American Ivy,” released on her podcast in 2022. But those iterations are now known, in the TikTok world, as “old preppy.” The new sort fills its Pinterest pages with something else: colorful Stanley mugs, tiered pink micro-minis, bulbed makeup mirrors and Brazilian Bum Bum Creams. Part of what makes it hard to describe is that it is not rooted in any specific culture; it seems to be largely about being fun and a girl and buying things packaged with a bright color on a white background. There is no deep ethos to it, no shared experience other than posting videos of shopping hauls or makeup routines — pastimes usually engaged in alone, in your bedroom.
This is not just true of “preppy.” If you are a teenager or have exposure to teenagers, what I am about to write is something you probably know already. Subcultures in general — once the poles of style and art and politics and music around which wound so many ribbons of teenage meaning — have largely collapsed.
What teenagers today are offered instead is a hyperactive landscape of so-called aesthetics — thousands of them, including everything from the infamous cottagecore to, these days, prep. These are more like cultural atmospheres, performed mainly online, with names and looks and hashtags, an easy visual pablum. They come and go and blend and break apart like clouds in the wind, many within weeks of appearing. They have much content but little context — a lot to look at but a very thin relationship to any “real life” anything, like behaviors or gathering places. On one end, even a distinctly in-the-world subculture (like, say, grunge) can be reduced to a vibe packet of anodyne references (cigarettes, grimy things); on the other, a mere mood tone can be elevated to something offered as lifestyle (there are girls who enjoy the color red and a certain Euro effortlessness, and they are called Tomato Girls, while others who prefer white are called Vanilla Girls). If two dozen things on a Pinterest page feel as if they go together, chances are someone, even just as a lark or experiment, is calling it an aesthetic.
For proof, you need only log on to Aesthetics Wiki, a wonderfully encyclopedic website for online style tribes. Here you will find not only large categories like emo, Y2K, VSCO, academia or the perennial goth but also categories so specific that their nicheness begins feeling like an Escher staircase of references. The roughly 200 aesthetics found under the randomly chosen letter M contain some that will be legible to many (Memphis rap, Mod), some that involve a kind of style-sensitive hairsplitting (Mallgoth, Messy French It Girl, McBling) and others that are just full-on W.T.F.: Meatcore is for people who appreciate raw meat as a nondietary object, and Monumentality is the appreciation of anything big, like Godzilla, Gothic cathedrals, giant redwoods or asteroids (“many asteroids are fairly large”). It’s hard to imagine a Monumentality meetup because, like so many aesthetics, Monumentality is only referential, its conversation ending right where it begins: Do you like this big thing? Yes, because it is big.
As with much of today’s popular culture (say, A.S.M.R. hair-brushing or pimple-popping videos), the level of specificity and intimate itch-scratching here feels a lot like porn — another extension of the internet’s ability to service niche desires. And in terms of their enhancement of human experience, many aesthetics seem to offer about as much as porn does: a fleeting personal pleasure to be had mainly alone.
Yet when I look at the younger people in my life — the teenagers crate-digging through these details, arguing about “dark academia” versus “light academia” or the differences between “goblincore” and “crowcore” — it doesn’t seem to me that they want to negate meaning. It seems as though they are looking, hard, for identity, for validation, for the dignification of their taste. It’s just that they are being presented with these thin cultural planes that barely exist outside their devices.
That this moment had become a meme, spawning an array of other videos riffing on the original (we see the girl enter a derelict classroom or padded cell and swoon, each time, that it’s “so preppy in here”) was far less confusing to me than the fact that people were calling this store — an all-white box exploding with smiley-face sweatshirts, tie-dyed fuzzy bathrobes and a generally berserk neon beachiness — preppy.
My daughter’s “preppy” is not my idea of preppy — the prep of actual New England prep schools, of frayed Oxford cloth and WASPy noblesse oblige. Nor is it the aspirational varsity style of Tommy Hilfiger and 1990s rappers in rugby shirts, or even J. Crew’s self-conscious 2010s update on old-money style. Those meanings haven’t vanished; a great deal has been written about them lately, much of it connected to Avery Trufelman’s erudite series “American Ivy,” released on her podcast in 2022. But those iterations are now known, in the TikTok world, as “old preppy.” The new sort fills its Pinterest pages with something else: colorful Stanley mugs, tiered pink micro-minis, bulbed makeup mirrors and Brazilian Bum Bum Creams. Part of what makes it hard to describe is that it is not rooted in any specific culture; it seems to be largely about being fun and a girl and buying things packaged with a bright color on a white background. There is no deep ethos to it, no shared experience other than posting videos of shopping hauls or makeup routines — pastimes usually engaged in alone, in your bedroom.
This is not just true of “preppy.” If you are a teenager or have exposure to teenagers, what I am about to write is something you probably know already. Subcultures in general — once the poles of style and art and politics and music around which wound so many ribbons of teenage meaning — have largely collapsed.
What teenagers today are offered instead is a hyperactive landscape of so-called aesthetics — thousands of them, including everything from the infamous cottagecore to, these days, prep. These are more like cultural atmospheres, performed mainly online, with names and looks and hashtags, an easy visual pablum. They come and go and blend and break apart like clouds in the wind, many within weeks of appearing. They have much content but little context — a lot to look at but a very thin relationship to any “real life” anything, like behaviors or gathering places. On one end, even a distinctly in-the-world subculture (like, say, grunge) can be reduced to a vibe packet of anodyne references (cigarettes, grimy things); on the other, a mere mood tone can be elevated to something offered as lifestyle (there are girls who enjoy the color red and a certain Euro effortlessness, and they are called Tomato Girls, while others who prefer white are called Vanilla Girls). If two dozen things on a Pinterest page feel as if they go together, chances are someone, even just as a lark or experiment, is calling it an aesthetic.
For proof, you need only log on to Aesthetics Wiki, a wonderfully encyclopedic website for online style tribes. Here you will find not only large categories like emo, Y2K, VSCO, academia or the perennial goth but also categories so specific that their nicheness begins feeling like an Escher staircase of references. The roughly 200 aesthetics found under the randomly chosen letter M contain some that will be legible to many (Memphis rap, Mod), some that involve a kind of style-sensitive hairsplitting (Mallgoth, Messy French It Girl, McBling) and others that are just full-on W.T.F.: Meatcore is for people who appreciate raw meat as a nondietary object, and Monumentality is the appreciation of anything big, like Godzilla, Gothic cathedrals, giant redwoods or asteroids (“many asteroids are fairly large”). It’s hard to imagine a Monumentality meetup because, like so many aesthetics, Monumentality is only referential, its conversation ending right where it begins: Do you like this big thing? Yes, because it is big.
As with much of today’s popular culture (say, A.S.M.R. hair-brushing or pimple-popping videos), the level of specificity and intimate itch-scratching here feels a lot like porn — another extension of the internet’s ability to service niche desires. And in terms of their enhancement of human experience, many aesthetics seem to offer about as much as porn does: a fleeting personal pleasure to be had mainly alone.
Yet when I look at the younger people in my life — the teenagers crate-digging through these details, arguing about “dark academia” versus “light academia” or the differences between “goblincore” and “crowcore” — it doesn’t seem to me that they want to negate meaning. It seems as though they are looking, hard, for identity, for validation, for the dignification of their taste. It’s just that they are being presented with these thin cultural planes that barely exist outside their devices.
To me, this is tragic, and I feel annoyed on their behalf. So I will risk sounding like an old raver shaking her cane to note that subcultures, even the vapid ones, used to tie their participants to people and places. Getting into a scene could be work; it required figuring out whom to talk to, or where to go, and maybe hanging awkwardly around a record store or nightclub or street corner until you got scooped up by whatever was happening. But at its deepest, a subculture could allow a given club kid, headbanger or punk to live in a communal container from the moment she woke up to the moment she went to bed. If you were, say, a suburban California skate rat in 1990, skating affected almost everything you did: how you spoke, the way you dressed, the people you hung out with, the places you went, the issues you cared about, the shape of your very body. And while that might not have seemed a promising plan for teenage well-being at the time, by today’s standards of diffuse loneliness and alienation among youth, it looks like a very good recipe indeed — precisely the kind of real-world cultural community that has been replaced by an algorithmic fluidity in which nothing hangs around long enough to grow roots.
by Mireille Silcoff, NY TImes Magazine | Read more:
Image: Photo illustration by Ricardo Santos
[ed. Yeah...not so sure about this. If you extract fashion from the equation there are in fact quite a few prominent subcultures at work, Swifties being only one example - and even there fashion seems like an adjacent aesthetic. Coachella. Gamers, Cosplayers, etc. Maybe I'm missing the point, but this feels like an overly feminized perspective focused on only one dimension of teenage culture.]
Image: Photo illustration by Ricardo Santos
Petr Barna as Charlie Chaplin
Petr Barna at the 1992 Albertville Olypmics's Exhibition Gala.
Though as far as sport and competition go, for those not familiar with figure skating, exhibitions are done after the competition and the winners or runners up* get to perform. They are not for a prize nor are they scored; he wasn't competing for anything here. Exhibition skates are more relaxed rules-wise, so sillier choreography and costumes, weirder song choices, and props are more often seen in them.
*For those curious, Petr Barna won bronze in this Olympics!
Though as far as sport and competition go, for those not familiar with figure skating, exhibitions are done after the competition and the winners or runners up* get to perform. They are not for a prize nor are they scored; he wasn't competing for anything here. Exhibition skates are more relaxed rules-wise, so sillier choreography and costumes, weirder song choices, and props are more often seen in them.
*For those curious, Petr Barna won bronze in this Olympics!
[ed. I keep coming back to this. What a great performance.]
Friday, February 23, 2024
Chaos, Straight to Your In-Box
The epistolary novel, a literary genre that has included, among its entries, works like Samuel Richardson’s “Pamela” and Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” has recently welcomed a new classic to the category. The author of this chef-d’œuvre is none other than the former President Donald J. Trump, who has, in the past several months, been sending his supporters fund-raising missives over e-mail, multiple times a week, and, often, as if amid some kind of frenzy, multiple times a day.
Indeed, the e-mails arrive so frequently that it’s easy to grow numb to how bonkers they are. Alternating among alarming warnings, vaudevillian cracks, craven flattery, folksy insults, erratic typography and punctuation, and, of course, impassioned pleas for donations, all presented in a graphic-design language seemingly generated by MS Paint, they make for a rollicking and often frightening joyride. On February 2nd, for instance, Trump supporters around the world received an e-mail with the subject line “Sick F-Word.” (The preview text: “You won’t believe what Biden just called me.”) When they opened the e-mail, subscribers were greeted with an all-caps sentence, bolded and highlighted in yellow: “BIDEN JUST CALLED ME A SICK F-WORD!”
It might seem like a stretch to argue that this e-mail, along with the messages that preceded and followed it, amount to a novel, as opposed to a slew of worrying memoranda. But these dispatches, considered in toto, are a hectic, interwoven document that can take us, much like the best novels do, from tears to laughter and back in a single sitting. They can leave us feeling contemplative, wondering if there was ever such a thing as the American Dream. And they can also give us an opportunity to reflect on Trump’s state of mind in the run-up to the Republican nomination. The e-mails feel more diaristic than the former President’s tweets, which were written with a larger audience in mind (haters, the media). These pieces are more revealing of Trump’s inner, most unhinged self because, with them, he’s speaking directly to his adherents.
It bears acknowledging that political fund-raising e-mails are often touched by at least a tinge of hysteria. The desire to speak to the perceived supporter through her in-box—to grab her metaphorical lapels by any means necessary and tug extra hard on her heartstrings—is par for the course. After being a recipient of Nancy Pelosi’s e-mails for a while, I began to tire of the over-the-top language the Speaker tended to use in her missives, to convey the urgency of whatever matter she was writing about. (“This is absolutely critical, Naomi.” “This is your last chance.” “I can’t stop them alone, Naomi. . . . Will you chip in $19?”) “I love that every email from Nancy Pelosi begins with something like, ‘naomi, my heart is pounding and I can’t breathe,’ ” I tweeted, in 2022. “ ‘Can you pitch in.’ ” And yet Trump’s e-mails are still unique in this landscape, for their ability to offer a kind of D.J.T. greatest-hits package, wildly mixing and remixing favorite phrases and styles into a fevered Surrealist cut-up.
While campaigning for the Republican nomination, which he will most likely clinch, Trump is concurrently in deep legal shit, fighting accusations of fraud, hush money, sexual assault, and election subversion. There are so many lawsuits that, as one commentator recently wrote, “merely keeping track of the many cases against Donald Trump requires a law degree, a great deal of attention, or both.” Most recently, in late January, a Manhattan jury determined that Trump should pay the journalist E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million in damages for defaming her. Or, as my colleague Eric Lach put it, a jury told Trump “to shut up and pay up.” But Trump is hardly the type to shut up, and the e-mails have been one way for him to keep yapping. Invariably, they contain constant intimations of persecution (the term “witch hunt,” for instance, has appeared in campaign e-mails sent in January nearly ninety times), but also insistent professions of triumph, and the two often appear in quick succession. In an e-mail from January 9th—which begins, as do all of Trump’s e-mails, with the salutation “Patriot”—the ex-President writes:
As I was reading the e-mails, I was reminded of the dénouement of Martin Scorsese’s “GoodFellas,” whose mobster protagonist, Henry Hill, haunted and coked-up and attempting to outrun the Feds on one frantic day’s journey into night, is certain that his every move is being surveilled by a helicopter. “No, I’m not nuts, this thing’s been following me all fucking morning, I’m telling you,” he says, sweaty and beleaguered. Why won’t they stop trying to take him down? During the scene, George Harrison’s “What Is Life” begins to play, and the lyrics of the song, too, are instructive. “Tell me, what is my life without your love? And tell me, who am I without you by my side?” Harrison sings. This, in fact, is the other half of the Trump formula. His enemies might try to muzzle him, but this means only that he needs to hold those who do support him even closer. An e-mail from January 23rd opens with these words:
The photographs that accompany the e-mails also alternate between good-guy Trump and bad-guy Trump, and the opposition between the personae is as blatant as that between smiley and frowny emojis. In an e-mail from January 13th, Trump suggests that “Crooked Joe” (more than eighty mentions of the term, by the way, within a single month’s messages) “charged Hollywood celebrities nearly $1 million to meet him.” The former President, however, considers each and every “Patriot” he is addressing in his e-mails as “the real star of our country,” and is raffling off a V.I.P. visit to Mar-a-Lago among those who contribute just one dollar to the campaign. In the appended picture, a technicolor Trump with his thumb up, grinning strenuously as if laughing at a gag just beyond frame, is crudely photoshopped onto an aerial image of the country club and the blindingly turquoise ocean beyond it. Not only will the winner “get to take a special photo with yours truly so that you can remember this amazing night forever!,” Trump writes, but they’ll also “get to enjoy drinks and hors d’œuvres on me,” and receive “an autographed hat from your favorite President. Sounds like a much better deal to me!”
Indeed, the e-mails arrive so frequently that it’s easy to grow numb to how bonkers they are. Alternating among alarming warnings, vaudevillian cracks, craven flattery, folksy insults, erratic typography and punctuation, and, of course, impassioned pleas for donations, all presented in a graphic-design language seemingly generated by MS Paint, they make for a rollicking and often frightening joyride. On February 2nd, for instance, Trump supporters around the world received an e-mail with the subject line “Sick F-Word.” (The preview text: “You won’t believe what Biden just called me.”) When they opened the e-mail, subscribers were greeted with an all-caps sentence, bolded and highlighted in yellow: “BIDEN JUST CALLED ME A SICK F-WORD!”
It bears acknowledging that political fund-raising e-mails are often touched by at least a tinge of hysteria. The desire to speak to the perceived supporter through her in-box—to grab her metaphorical lapels by any means necessary and tug extra hard on her heartstrings—is par for the course. After being a recipient of Nancy Pelosi’s e-mails for a while, I began to tire of the over-the-top language the Speaker tended to use in her missives, to convey the urgency of whatever matter she was writing about. (“This is absolutely critical, Naomi.” “This is your last chance.” “I can’t stop them alone, Naomi. . . . Will you chip in $19?”) “I love that every email from Nancy Pelosi begins with something like, ‘naomi, my heart is pounding and I can’t breathe,’ ” I tweeted, in 2022. “ ‘Can you pitch in.’ ” And yet Trump’s e-mails are still unique in this landscape, for their ability to offer a kind of D.J.T. greatest-hits package, wildly mixing and remixing favorite phrases and styles into a fevered Surrealist cut-up.
While campaigning for the Republican nomination, which he will most likely clinch, Trump is concurrently in deep legal shit, fighting accusations of fraud, hush money, sexual assault, and election subversion. There are so many lawsuits that, as one commentator recently wrote, “merely keeping track of the many cases against Donald Trump requires a law degree, a great deal of attention, or both.” Most recently, in late January, a Manhattan jury determined that Trump should pay the journalist E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million in damages for defaming her. Or, as my colleague Eric Lach put it, a jury told Trump “to shut up and pay up.” But Trump is hardly the type to shut up, and the e-mails have been one way for him to keep yapping. Invariably, they contain constant intimations of persecution (the term “witch hunt,” for instance, has appeared in campaign e-mails sent in January nearly ninety times), but also insistent professions of triumph, and the two often appear in quick succession. In an e-mail from January 9th—which begins, as do all of Trump’s e-mails, with the salutation “Patriot”—the ex-President writes:
They’ve wrongfully ARRESTED me four times, took a MUGSHOT of me, forced me off the campaign trail and into the courtroom for SHAM TRIALS, unlawfully REMOVED my name from the ballot, GAGGED and CENSORED me, are attempting to JAIL me for life as an innocent man, and are even seeking the ‘corporate death penalty’ against me and my family.Where does one even begin? I guess we might as well start with the e-mail’s inexplicable ransom-note-style font decisions. Why is YOU capped but not italicized, whereas WE is capped and italicized? Why is the first paragraph bolded (and in red type), whereas the second is not? Why is “corporate death penalty” both scare-quoted and italicized? The typographical chaos mimics the legal, political, and psychic chaos in which Trump operates; and yet his relentless energy seems to emerge from this very chaos, as he paranoically and insistently narrates his woes in a kind of stream of consciousness, by turns slinging mud at the so-called haters, proclaiming his perseverance, and flattering and wheedling his supporters. He is Jesus on the cross, but he will survive! The strength of the words, too, depends on their ability to capture the ex-President’s oratorical cadence. The all-caps, tabloidesque feel of ARRESTED, MUGSHOT, SHAM TRIALS, and so on mirrors the rhythmic ebb and flow of Trump’s speech, apparently so intoxicating to his followers.
And despite all this, with YOU at my side, I’ve never been more confident that WE will prevail in our noble mission . . . just as we always have.
As I was reading the e-mails, I was reminded of the dénouement of Martin Scorsese’s “GoodFellas,” whose mobster protagonist, Henry Hill, haunted and coked-up and attempting to outrun the Feds on one frantic day’s journey into night, is certain that his every move is being surveilled by a helicopter. “No, I’m not nuts, this thing’s been following me all fucking morning, I’m telling you,” he says, sweaty and beleaguered. Why won’t they stop trying to take him down? During the scene, George Harrison’s “What Is Life” begins to play, and the lyrics of the song, too, are instructive. “Tell me, what is my life without your love? And tell me, who am I without you by my side?” Harrison sings. This, in fact, is the other half of the Trump formula. His enemies might try to muzzle him, but this means only that he needs to hold those who do support him even closer. An e-mail from January 23rd opens with these words:
This is President Trump, and I’ll never stop loving you.This is a bond that is based on persecution, and the harsher the torment the more ardently tender the bond becomes: it’s Romeo and Juliet, or even Bonnie and Clyde. (...)
Why? Because you’ve always loved me!
You stuck by me every single time the Radical Left tried to KICK ME DOWN.
Even when they took my mugshot at the Fulton County Jail.
I felt your love even when they RAIDED MY HOME.
Through all the HOAXES, WITCH HUNTS, and FAKE INDICTMENTS, you never left my side!
The photographs that accompany the e-mails also alternate between good-guy Trump and bad-guy Trump, and the opposition between the personae is as blatant as that between smiley and frowny emojis. In an e-mail from January 13th, Trump suggests that “Crooked Joe” (more than eighty mentions of the term, by the way, within a single month’s messages) “charged Hollywood celebrities nearly $1 million to meet him.” The former President, however, considers each and every “Patriot” he is addressing in his e-mails as “the real star of our country,” and is raffling off a V.I.P. visit to Mar-a-Lago among those who contribute just one dollar to the campaign. In the appended picture, a technicolor Trump with his thumb up, grinning strenuously as if laughing at a gag just beyond frame, is crudely photoshopped onto an aerial image of the country club and the blindingly turquoise ocean beyond it. Not only will the winner “get to take a special photo with yours truly so that you can remember this amazing night forever!,” Trump writes, but they’ll also “get to enjoy drinks and hors d’œuvres on me,” and receive “an autographed hat from your favorite President. Sounds like a much better deal to me!”
by Naomi Fry, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Al Drago/Getty/Bloomberg
[ed. I hope supporters keep sending him money, they deserve it.]
Arranging Love
Years after my mother had died, on a visit to my father in his childhood home in Nagercoil, India, where he had settled after his retirement, he told me he had always wanted to marry a Tamil girl from a prominent Christian family. Someone who had been selected by his beloved mother, someone who would live among his relatives. A traditional arranged marriage. But he had married my mother because they had “fallen in love.” Why was he telling me this? I remember feeling so sad and disappointed at his words. Had he been regretting his marriage all those years?
In India, in those days and even now, almost all marriages are arranged. Parents select potential mates for their children, taking great care to find someone from within their religious, socioeconomic, and cultural circles, so that there will be little cause for disharmony. Growing up in India, I remember always telling my friends with some pride that my parents instead had a “Love Marriage,” sickeningly enthusiastic that this would put all their parents’ “Arranged Marriages” to shame. All through my teenage years and beyond, I was fascinated by this idea of the love marriage. Seeing someone across a room, maybe even falling in love at first sight. And that is what my parents had done. They became smitten with each other in their College faculty room. And now he was telling me that perhaps he should have had an arranged marriage after all.
I sat with his words. I tried the instant replay button on my middle-aged memory, trying to recall everything my mother had told me about their initial meeting, their courtship, their marriage. I wanted to understand why he said those words to me. And perhaps I would better understand why I fell so easily, instantly, in love with a man named Jeff Sugar.
My parents were young lecturers at Andhra Christian College in Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, when they met. My mother was a great beauty and my father spotted her amid other chatting faculty and made a beeline for her. They spent time together at work talking for hours, and sometimes he walked her home from the college. In those days, women were not supposed to spend any time alone with a man, even in full view of others. Most people had arranged marriages, and the couples did not even get to speak with each other before the wedding. So, their spending so much time together openly was considered scandalous, and everyone expected a wedding soon. Then one day, my father left Guntur suddenly and unexpectedly for a teaching job in another city, Nagpur.
When I was 12, I found a stack of letters tied up with thin satin blue ribbons hidden in the steel almirah in my parent’s bedroom. They were romantic messages to my dad from my mother, pleading, almost begging him to return from Nagpur. They always started, “My dearest Raji.” They were full of love and adoration but also with an edge of panic. She must have known that if they did not get married, there would be no marriage at all for her. No one would arrange nuptials for someone who’d been seen conversing with another man, hand-holding and maybe kissing (I am not sure).
My mother came from a very distinguished family. Her father, Valaparla Chinna John, was the first Indian to be appointed as the head of a major college under the British Raj. He was awarded the Kaiser-I-Hind, the equivalent award to the Order of the British Empire, from King George VI, for excellence in education. And my mom was his favorite daughter. She had been raised in comfort with lots of servants in the house. She had received no instructions from her mother about how to run a household or how to cook. The expectation had always been that she would marry into a family with prestige and wealth. But then her parents died, and aunts and uncles — inattentive to her needs — did not step up and perform the duty.
My father, on the other hand, was raised rather frugally by a very strict mother. He was the only son of Packiam Masilamony, a young beauty from a poor family. My paternal grandfather had spotted my grandmother while he was riding by her village on horseback. He told his mother about her and his mother arranged their marriage. When my father told me this I thought it was the most romantic thing I had ever heard. He must have inherited his passionate streak from his father! My grandfather died shortly thereafter, leaving my father’s mother a widow with two very young children. She worked hard and saved all her money to send her son to college. So, my father grew up with no luxuries and he was expected to excel in school and college — which he did. His sister was married off in an arranged marriage right after high school.
Whether my mother’s letters had reminded him of their love for each other or his sense of duty toward her, my father did come back eventually from Nagpur and married my mother. He must have known the terrible blow that would have befallen my mother’s reputation. She had “kept company” with a man, been seen together, and most damning of all, been seen holding hands and walking alone through the paddy fields with no chaperone!
My parents had a church wedding with my mother’s relatives in attendance, but no one from my father’s family was there. He was too afraid to tell his mother and face her wrath. It was the right of an Indian mother to select her son’s bride. How could he tell her that after raising him singlehandedly since he was four, he had denied her this much-awaited pleasure!
In their wedding photograph, my father stood by himself, the only Tamilian in the wedding party among Andhras. My mother had all her sisters and extended family with her. Standing in her wedding attire, a radiant beauty, she is not smiling, as she is always self-conscious about the gap in her front teeth. Her beauty shows through anyway. My father looks very handsome in his dark suit. He is smiling, so I want to believe that he entered into the marriage happily.
An Indian mother expects her son and daughter-in-law to live with her after they get married, but when my father took his new bride to visit his mother in Nagercoil, she refused to open the door and screamed abuses from the other side. They had to leave and go stay with his married sister. After that reception from her mother-in-law, my mother never forgave her and would not consider allowing my father to invite his mother to live with them. This would have been unacceptable in an arranged marriage, but this was love — and my mother did not have her parents to guide her in this matter. For most Indian couples, their parents and extended families play a large supportive role in their lives, both emotionally, and at times financially, to help the couple through difficult times. This was completely absent in my parents’ lives.
Guilt about letting his mother down led to resentment. He would taunt my mother that his mother would never have picked her. Almost every day, I heard him say that he missed living in Nagercoil, missed hearing his language, Tamil spoken, and how living in the large city of Calcutta surrounded by people who did not accept him, was not what he would have chosen. He could not speak in Tamil to her as she spoke Telugu, her mother tongue — another casualty of a love marriage between two people from different States in India. So, they spoke to each other in English.
My father would talk about his mother with pride and throw her up as an example of the perfect Indian woman. How she had done the right thing and married a man her parents had presented to her, how she spurned her many suitors after she became a widow, how she devoted her life to raising her daughter and son. Did my father, deep down, not respect my mother for breaking all tradition and marrying him? Now I knew that he had always wanted a traditional woman as his wife, like his mother, someone from a similar socioeconomic background, not my highly educated mother who came from a more affluent family. Had he fallen for my mother’s charm and beauty and intelligence against all his better judgment?
During their marriage, I remember they had major arguments. It would always start with my father bringing up his mother not living with them. They would devolve into how my father grew up with a careful penny-pinching mother — no wastage of anything allowed in the house. If he berated her for “wasting” something in the house, it was hard for my mother to take as she was raised as a “princess” in a mansion! Would her parents have arranged her marriage with a struggling teacher? Definitely not. There were times when their fights would make my mother cry and hide in the bedroom. This was when I would wish that she would leave him. But nobody gets divorced in India, and deep down I did not really want them to split up.
As soon as I finished medical school at 21, my parents started bringing me “matches.” But I had conjured up such ideals in my head, long-fantasizing about a love marriage. I wanted that meet-cute, that rom-com, those flowers. How exciting would that be! As a teenager, I used to hide away in our apartment and devour books including a ton of romantic novels published by Mills and Boons, and the Regency Romances series by Georgette Heyer. I wanted a “love marriage” like my mother — wanted passion, the knight in shining armor, a man who would fall in love with me and stay in love. I wanted a love marriage even though I knew my parent’s love marriage was not ideal. Not someone picked by your parents, from your own community and background that you know so well.
As is the customary manner of the arranged marriage, my parents presented me with descriptions of young men from suitable families, sometimes with an accompanying photograph. I was allowed to meet them for a coffee — nothing more — and I was expected to pick one of them to marry. My classmates were getting married one by one, all arranged, and this was beginning to put a lot of pressure on me to do the same. When I was 25 years old, after rejecting all my parents’ attempts at coordinating a marriage for me, I left for America to further my career and to find true love. Before I left, my mother said to me, “Be very careful about who you choose to marry, for out of that comes everything in life.” I didn’t give her words much thought then.
In India, in those days and even now, almost all marriages are arranged. Parents select potential mates for their children, taking great care to find someone from within their religious, socioeconomic, and cultural circles, so that there will be little cause for disharmony. Growing up in India, I remember always telling my friends with some pride that my parents instead had a “Love Marriage,” sickeningly enthusiastic that this would put all their parents’ “Arranged Marriages” to shame. All through my teenage years and beyond, I was fascinated by this idea of the love marriage. Seeing someone across a room, maybe even falling in love at first sight. And that is what my parents had done. They became smitten with each other in their College faculty room. And now he was telling me that perhaps he should have had an arranged marriage after all.
My parents were young lecturers at Andhra Christian College in Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, when they met. My mother was a great beauty and my father spotted her amid other chatting faculty and made a beeline for her. They spent time together at work talking for hours, and sometimes he walked her home from the college. In those days, women were not supposed to spend any time alone with a man, even in full view of others. Most people had arranged marriages, and the couples did not even get to speak with each other before the wedding. So, their spending so much time together openly was considered scandalous, and everyone expected a wedding soon. Then one day, my father left Guntur suddenly and unexpectedly for a teaching job in another city, Nagpur.
When I was 12, I found a stack of letters tied up with thin satin blue ribbons hidden in the steel almirah in my parent’s bedroom. They were romantic messages to my dad from my mother, pleading, almost begging him to return from Nagpur. They always started, “My dearest Raji.” They were full of love and adoration but also with an edge of panic. She must have known that if they did not get married, there would be no marriage at all for her. No one would arrange nuptials for someone who’d been seen conversing with another man, hand-holding and maybe kissing (I am not sure).
My mother came from a very distinguished family. Her father, Valaparla Chinna John, was the first Indian to be appointed as the head of a major college under the British Raj. He was awarded the Kaiser-I-Hind, the equivalent award to the Order of the British Empire, from King George VI, for excellence in education. And my mom was his favorite daughter. She had been raised in comfort with lots of servants in the house. She had received no instructions from her mother about how to run a household or how to cook. The expectation had always been that she would marry into a family with prestige and wealth. But then her parents died, and aunts and uncles — inattentive to her needs — did not step up and perform the duty.
My father, on the other hand, was raised rather frugally by a very strict mother. He was the only son of Packiam Masilamony, a young beauty from a poor family. My paternal grandfather had spotted my grandmother while he was riding by her village on horseback. He told his mother about her and his mother arranged their marriage. When my father told me this I thought it was the most romantic thing I had ever heard. He must have inherited his passionate streak from his father! My grandfather died shortly thereafter, leaving my father’s mother a widow with two very young children. She worked hard and saved all her money to send her son to college. So, my father grew up with no luxuries and he was expected to excel in school and college — which he did. His sister was married off in an arranged marriage right after high school.
Whether my mother’s letters had reminded him of their love for each other or his sense of duty toward her, my father did come back eventually from Nagpur and married my mother. He must have known the terrible blow that would have befallen my mother’s reputation. She had “kept company” with a man, been seen together, and most damning of all, been seen holding hands and walking alone through the paddy fields with no chaperone!
My parents had a church wedding with my mother’s relatives in attendance, but no one from my father’s family was there. He was too afraid to tell his mother and face her wrath. It was the right of an Indian mother to select her son’s bride. How could he tell her that after raising him singlehandedly since he was four, he had denied her this much-awaited pleasure!
In their wedding photograph, my father stood by himself, the only Tamilian in the wedding party among Andhras. My mother had all her sisters and extended family with her. Standing in her wedding attire, a radiant beauty, she is not smiling, as she is always self-conscious about the gap in her front teeth. Her beauty shows through anyway. My father looks very handsome in his dark suit. He is smiling, so I want to believe that he entered into the marriage happily.
An Indian mother expects her son and daughter-in-law to live with her after they get married, but when my father took his new bride to visit his mother in Nagercoil, she refused to open the door and screamed abuses from the other side. They had to leave and go stay with his married sister. After that reception from her mother-in-law, my mother never forgave her and would not consider allowing my father to invite his mother to live with them. This would have been unacceptable in an arranged marriage, but this was love — and my mother did not have her parents to guide her in this matter. For most Indian couples, their parents and extended families play a large supportive role in their lives, both emotionally, and at times financially, to help the couple through difficult times. This was completely absent in my parents’ lives.
Guilt about letting his mother down led to resentment. He would taunt my mother that his mother would never have picked her. Almost every day, I heard him say that he missed living in Nagercoil, missed hearing his language, Tamil spoken, and how living in the large city of Calcutta surrounded by people who did not accept him, was not what he would have chosen. He could not speak in Tamil to her as she spoke Telugu, her mother tongue — another casualty of a love marriage between two people from different States in India. So, they spoke to each other in English.
My father would talk about his mother with pride and throw her up as an example of the perfect Indian woman. How she had done the right thing and married a man her parents had presented to her, how she spurned her many suitors after she became a widow, how she devoted her life to raising her daughter and son. Did my father, deep down, not respect my mother for breaking all tradition and marrying him? Now I knew that he had always wanted a traditional woman as his wife, like his mother, someone from a similar socioeconomic background, not my highly educated mother who came from a more affluent family. Had he fallen for my mother’s charm and beauty and intelligence against all his better judgment?
During their marriage, I remember they had major arguments. It would always start with my father bringing up his mother not living with them. They would devolve into how my father grew up with a careful penny-pinching mother — no wastage of anything allowed in the house. If he berated her for “wasting” something in the house, it was hard for my mother to take as she was raised as a “princess” in a mansion! Would her parents have arranged her marriage with a struggling teacher? Definitely not. There were times when their fights would make my mother cry and hide in the bedroom. This was when I would wish that she would leave him. But nobody gets divorced in India, and deep down I did not really want them to split up.
As soon as I finished medical school at 21, my parents started bringing me “matches.” But I had conjured up such ideals in my head, long-fantasizing about a love marriage. I wanted that meet-cute, that rom-com, those flowers. How exciting would that be! As a teenager, I used to hide away in our apartment and devour books including a ton of romantic novels published by Mills and Boons, and the Regency Romances series by Georgette Heyer. I wanted a “love marriage” like my mother — wanted passion, the knight in shining armor, a man who would fall in love with me and stay in love. I wanted a love marriage even though I knew my parent’s love marriage was not ideal. Not someone picked by your parents, from your own community and background that you know so well.
As is the customary manner of the arranged marriage, my parents presented me with descriptions of young men from suitable families, sometimes with an accompanying photograph. I was allowed to meet them for a coffee — nothing more — and I was expected to pick one of them to marry. My classmates were getting married one by one, all arranged, and this was beginning to put a lot of pressure on me to do the same. When I was 25 years old, after rejecting all my parents’ attempts at coordinating a marriage for me, I left for America to further my career and to find true love. Before I left, my mother said to me, “Be very careful about who you choose to marry, for out of that comes everything in life.” I didn’t give her words much thought then.
by Usha Raj, The Smart Set | Read more:
Image: Estelle Guillot
[ed. India is one of the world's largest economies and ancient cultures, yet still relatively unknown. Not for long, I think.]
Thursday, February 22, 2024
The Ancestral Tradition of Tequila in Jalisco, Mexico
Invisible to those around me, I could feel tiny tributaries of sweat beginning to creep down my backside. Standing outside under a blanket of blazing heat and looking ahead at a field filled with blue agave plants stretching towards an endless horizon, there was a certain peace here. Earlier that day, I’d traveled from my home in Atlanta to the state of Jalisco, Mexico, arriving in Guadalajara proper before journeying further and further away from those city limits, chiefly, to learn about tequila as a guest at the private, invite-only Hacienda Patrón located in Atotonilco El Alto.
Through the years, I’ve blithely joked that tequila makes me cry. Imbibing on the blue agave spirit does tend to inspire me to be more outwardly emotional than usual, and overall, the spirit isn’t my drink of choice. But being in the land of tequila and learning firsthand about the process, one could say I was inspired, and motivated to move past my perpetual tequila indifference.
A cacophony of sounds disrupted the serene silence as a jimador, someone practiced in the art of breaking down an agave plant for processing elsewhere, went to work. Wielding a hoe, he whacked the greenery over and over again with fervor until the bitter outward leaves began to peel away from the winter-white, pineapple-looking heart of the agave. His movements were so precise, his swings appeared to pare the plant like a hot knife sinking into butter.
Our guides had taken us on a tour of Patrón’s facilities and distilling process. It was only after I missed several cues that I realized it was my turn to get involved in the unearthing process. At the direction of the jimador, I shoved a metal tool that looked like a thermometer into the heart of one of the piñas he’d just finished cutting down. My guide quickly translated into English that the tool was used to measure the amount of sugar within the piña that had just been harvested.
Throughout the rest of my time in Jalisco, thought about what it took to make every tequila I drank. Beyond the labor itself, what stuck with me was how central ancestral tradition is to the making of tequila. But the one thing that stuck with me beyond the sightseeing and tasting of several tequilas within was how central tradition and ancestral practice is to the fruit of labor that is a bottle of tequila.
The practice of being a jimador is often generational; a father teaches the art to a son, nephew, or another family member, and when they are of age, they take the baton, making this trade their own. In areas that are otherwise unreachable — in valleys or on mountaintops — jimadores set out on a tequila quest in teams of up to seven people, filling trucks with piñas, that will be cooked, crushed, and fermented at distilleries before landing in a bottle for consumption and delight.
In a world where buzzy celebrity-backed tequila lines are on-trend, especially when viewed as another way of creating a lucrative income stream, there is importance in looking to the artisanal and indigenous practices that are the foundation of what it means to appreciate tequila.
What we drink and the food we eat are not merely touchstones of our tastes and preferences. They can also be a ritual of remembrance connecting us to those who came before us, those who studied a craft to become truly good at something. We eat, we taste, we drink in celebration of them and of ourselves. We honor them and ourselves in continuing to reach for our ancestral and cultural foods.
by Nneka M. Okona, Eater | Read more:
Image: Michelle K. Min
[ed. The links are key here, like this one (The Ultimate Guide to Tequila).]
Tequila is actually a denomination of origin comprising all of Jalisco, and some municipalities in the states of Nayarit, Tamaulipas, Michoacán, and Guanajuato. To qualify as a tequila, Mexico’s most famous spirit can only be made with agave tequilana Weber azul, or blue agave, from this region. The finished tequila must have a minimum of 51 percent blue agave, although the majority of tequila is 100 percent blue agave, allowing for up to 1 percent additives. Tequilas must also be a minimum of 35 percent to 55 percent ABV, and bottles sold in the United States require a minimum ABV of 40 percent (water is used to lower the proof to the desired number).
These strict regulations do still offer considerable variations to the tequila consumer. There are some 1,377 brands registered by the Consejo Regulador del Tequila (CRT), the regulatory board that upholds the standards of tequila manufacturing tracked by the Norma Oficial Mexico (NOM) for the Appellation of Origin. But the system is not without its flaws. In recent years, the CRT has allowed brands to add up to 1 percent additives to 100 percent blue agave tequila without disclosure. It has also allowed celebrities to easily release tequilas, including George Clooney, Xzibit, and Kendall Jenner, who has faced backlash for cultural appropriation over the launch of her 818 Tequila. It’s a practice that seems at odds with a legal body tasked with preserving tequila and Mexican tradition.
[ed. See also: How Do You Tell If Your Tequila Has Additives? (Forbes).]
Through the years, I’ve blithely joked that tequila makes me cry. Imbibing on the blue agave spirit does tend to inspire me to be more outwardly emotional than usual, and overall, the spirit isn’t my drink of choice. But being in the land of tequila and learning firsthand about the process, one could say I was inspired, and motivated to move past my perpetual tequila indifference.
Our guides had taken us on a tour of Patrón’s facilities and distilling process. It was only after I missed several cues that I realized it was my turn to get involved in the unearthing process. At the direction of the jimador, I shoved a metal tool that looked like a thermometer into the heart of one of the piñas he’d just finished cutting down. My guide quickly translated into English that the tool was used to measure the amount of sugar within the piña that had just been harvested.
Throughout the rest of my time in Jalisco, thought about what it took to make every tequila I drank. Beyond the labor itself, what stuck with me was how central ancestral tradition is to the making of tequila. But the one thing that stuck with me beyond the sightseeing and tasting of several tequilas within was how central tradition and ancestral practice is to the fruit of labor that is a bottle of tequila.
The practice of being a jimador is often generational; a father teaches the art to a son, nephew, or another family member, and when they are of age, they take the baton, making this trade their own. In areas that are otherwise unreachable — in valleys or on mountaintops — jimadores set out on a tequila quest in teams of up to seven people, filling trucks with piñas, that will be cooked, crushed, and fermented at distilleries before landing in a bottle for consumption and delight.
In a world where buzzy celebrity-backed tequila lines are on-trend, especially when viewed as another way of creating a lucrative income stream, there is importance in looking to the artisanal and indigenous practices that are the foundation of what it means to appreciate tequila.
What we drink and the food we eat are not merely touchstones of our tastes and preferences. They can also be a ritual of remembrance connecting us to those who came before us, those who studied a craft to become truly good at something. We eat, we taste, we drink in celebration of them and of ourselves. We honor them and ourselves in continuing to reach for our ancestral and cultural foods.
by Nneka M. Okona, Eater | Read more:
Image: Michelle K. Min
[ed. The links are key here, like this one (The Ultimate Guide to Tequila).]
Tequila is actually a denomination of origin comprising all of Jalisco, and some municipalities in the states of Nayarit, Tamaulipas, Michoacán, and Guanajuato. To qualify as a tequila, Mexico’s most famous spirit can only be made with agave tequilana Weber azul, or blue agave, from this region. The finished tequila must have a minimum of 51 percent blue agave, although the majority of tequila is 100 percent blue agave, allowing for up to 1 percent additives. Tequilas must also be a minimum of 35 percent to 55 percent ABV, and bottles sold in the United States require a minimum ABV of 40 percent (water is used to lower the proof to the desired number).
These strict regulations do still offer considerable variations to the tequila consumer. There are some 1,377 brands registered by the Consejo Regulador del Tequila (CRT), the regulatory board that upholds the standards of tequila manufacturing tracked by the Norma Oficial Mexico (NOM) for the Appellation of Origin. But the system is not without its flaws. In recent years, the CRT has allowed brands to add up to 1 percent additives to 100 percent blue agave tequila without disclosure. It has also allowed celebrities to easily release tequilas, including George Clooney, Xzibit, and Kendall Jenner, who has faced backlash for cultural appropriation over the launch of her 818 Tequila. It’s a practice that seems at odds with a legal body tasked with preserving tequila and Mexican tradition.
Tokenism
First of all, what is tokenism/tokenization?
We work from the below definition:
To recruit an individual or small number of people with marginalized identities in order to give the appearance of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) within the workplace while ignoring and/or continuing the root causes of inequity.
For context, the words token and tokenism date back into the Civil Rights Movement and have been referenced in academia many times since then. A few examples include:
The Case Against Tokenism by Dr. Martin Luther King (1962):
“But in the tradition of old guards, who would rather die than surrender, a new and hastily constructed roadblock has appeared in the form of planned and institutionalized tokenism...Thus we have advanced in some places from all-out, unrestrained resistance to a sophisticated form of delaying tactics, embodied in tokenism.”
Malcolm X’s interview with Louis Lomax (1963):
“What gains? All you have gotten is tokenism — one or two Negroes in a job or at a lunch counter so the rest of you will be quiet.” (In response to Lomax's comment "But we have made some gains…")
Tokenism and Women in the Workplace by Lynn Zimmer (1988):
“The token's marginal status [is] as a participant who is permitted entrance, but not full participation…someone who meets all of the formal requirements…but does not possess the ‘auxiliary characteristics’ (race, sex and ethnicity)... Consequently, they are never permitted by ‘insiders’ to become full members and may even be ejected if they stray too far from the special ‘niche’ outlined for them.”
The Making of a Token: A Case Study of Stereotype Threat, Stigma, Racism, and Tokenism in Academe by Yolanda Flores Niemann (1999):
“I was told, ‘Now that we have you, we don’t need to worry about hiring another minority.’ This sentiment is an example of covert racism in academia, which also includes the 'one-minority-per-pot syndrome." (...)
Tokenism is a form of racial capitalism, or extracting value from the racialized identities of others.
Tokenism is often just as prevalent in organizations practicing DEI, where it is used to deflect accusations about lack of diversity or inclusion without actually threatening the status quo.
How Tokenism Works Within Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)
As an attempt to pave the way for BIPOC, we’ve seen waves of DEI training, seminars, departments spring up in the last few years. However, these DEI networks often rely on a quota system when it comes to “diversifying” their workforce, or by hiring a few tokens to “represent” diversity in their organization, which only serves to reduce individuals to only their marginalized identities. (...)
"On June 4, the Puerto Rican food writer Illyanna Maisonet called out what she viewed as hypocrisy in Bon Appétit's solidarity effort, Insider's Anneta Konstantinides reported. Maisonet recalled that she pitched a story to the publication "about Afro-Boricuas that make regional rice fritters" — a pitch she said an editor rejected, reasoning it sounded like "a story that could have been told 5 years ago."
Bon Appétit went on to publish "another Euro-ingredient story," she wrote.
—illyanna Maisonet (@eatgordaeat) June 4, 2020
In a since-deleted Instagram post featuring a screenshot of her tweet, Maisonet elaborated on her concerns with Bon Appétit and its social-media activism.
"So, before we go praising them for patting themselves on the back for showing 'solidarity' during a time when it would be bad for business to NOT show solidarity… maybe we can get some full print issues of the regional foods of Puerto Rico," she wrote. "Oh, and Africa. Brazil. Basically, the entire f---ing Diaspora. BY people from the Diaspora." (...)
"I'm definitely certain listing your three POC staff token writers (two of which are white presenting) is helpful in ensuring I am aware of the 'diversity' BA HAS shown," Maisonet responded. "But I get that their avenues are less congested when it comes to getting ideas accepted, as they are staffers. That still doesn't deflect from the fact that you don't have any Puerto Rican stories or recipes."
The screenshots of the messages elicited a strong response on Twitter.
"He himself just listed BA's tokenization problem yet doesn't see it as a problem?" one commenter wrote."
We work from the below definition:
For context, the words token and tokenism date back into the Civil Rights Movement and have been referenced in academia many times since then. A few examples include:
The Case Against Tokenism by Dr. Martin Luther King (1962):
“But in the tradition of old guards, who would rather die than surrender, a new and hastily constructed roadblock has appeared in the form of planned and institutionalized tokenism...Thus we have advanced in some places from all-out, unrestrained resistance to a sophisticated form of delaying tactics, embodied in tokenism.”
Malcolm X’s interview with Louis Lomax (1963):
“What gains? All you have gotten is tokenism — one or two Negroes in a job or at a lunch counter so the rest of you will be quiet.” (In response to Lomax's comment "But we have made some gains…")
Tokenism and Women in the Workplace by Lynn Zimmer (1988):
“The token's marginal status [is] as a participant who is permitted entrance, but not full participation…someone who meets all of the formal requirements…but does not possess the ‘auxiliary characteristics’ (race, sex and ethnicity)... Consequently, they are never permitted by ‘insiders’ to become full members and may even be ejected if they stray too far from the special ‘niche’ outlined for them.”
The Making of a Token: A Case Study of Stereotype Threat, Stigma, Racism, and Tokenism in Academe by Yolanda Flores Niemann (1999):
“I was told, ‘Now that we have you, we don’t need to worry about hiring another minority.’ This sentiment is an example of covert racism in academia, which also includes the 'one-minority-per-pot syndrome." (...)
Tokenism is a form of racial capitalism, or extracting value from the racialized identities of others.
Tokenism is often just as prevalent in organizations practicing DEI, where it is used to deflect accusations about lack of diversity or inclusion without actually threatening the status quo.
“Tokenism is, simply, covert racism. Racism requires those in power to maintain their privilege by exercising social, economic and/or political muscle against people of color.Where Tokenism Begins:
Tokenism achieves the same while giving those in power the appearance of being non-racist and even champions of diversity because they recruit and use PoC as racialized props.”
- Helen Kim Ho, 8 Ways People of Color are Tokenized in Nonprofits
The Foundational Hierarchies in American Society
In order to understand tokenism, we must first accept the foundational hierarchies of our current society in the U.S.:
Systems of Oppression (including capitalism and white supremacy, see Glossary) work in concert to center the experiences, knowledge, and perspectives of white people, wealthy people, straight people, men, and able-bodied people, while oppressing people with marginalized identities.
Mainstream progressive movements (e.g., feminism) often erase people who exist at the intersections of marginalized identities (e.g., a Black queer non-binary person), while centering white identities (e.g. ,white women, white LGBTQ+ people), and people with proximities to whiteness (e.g., wealthy BIPOC).
In order to understand tokenism, we must first accept the foundational hierarchies of our current society in the U.S.:
Systems of Oppression (including capitalism and white supremacy, see Glossary) work in concert to center the experiences, knowledge, and perspectives of white people, wealthy people, straight people, men, and able-bodied people, while oppressing people with marginalized identities.
Mainstream progressive movements (e.g., feminism) often erase people who exist at the intersections of marginalized identities (e.g., a Black queer non-binary person), while centering white identities (e.g. ,white women, white LGBTQ+ people), and people with proximities to whiteness (e.g., wealthy BIPOC).
Consequently, tokenism manifests when the success of the one token minority person who’s “made it” is seen as proof of society’s progress and equality (e.g., when President Obama supposedly ushered in a "post-racial society"). However, even as “the one Indigenous person” or “the one queer person” or “the one working class person” has gained social and economic capital, the same oppressive systems continue to operate. (...)
How Tokenism Works Within Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)
As an attempt to pave the way for BIPOC, we’ve seen waves of DEI training, seminars, departments spring up in the last few years. However, these DEI networks often rely on a quota system when it comes to “diversifying” their workforce, or by hiring a few tokens to “represent” diversity in their organization, which only serves to reduce individuals to only their marginalized identities. (...)
This act of tokenism, especially within a PR-friendly DEI campaign, is particularly insidious because it presumes the token will be able to “fix” pre-existing internal issues without challenging the toxic structures already in place. This is usually because the organization’s leadership fundamentally does not want to, see the need to, or is equipped to to alter their approach or processes pertaining to how marginalized identities are addressed within their workplace; although diversity is a goal, inclusion is not.
In the worst scenarios, it becomes frustrating to the organization that the token hire is not supporting this underlying initiative — to stay static but give the outward appearance of being “diverse” or “inclusive” — and often gives way to that token hire becoming seen as the problem, because they are easier to attack, diminish, and ultimately remove than addressing the true structural changes required.
In the worst scenarios, it becomes frustrating to the organization that the token hire is not supporting this underlying initiative — to stay static but give the outward appearance of being “diverse” or “inclusive” — and often gives way to that token hire becoming seen as the problem, because they are easier to attack, diminish, and ultimately remove than addressing the true structural changes required.
by StudioATAO | Read more:
Image: uncredited via
"On June 4, the Puerto Rican food writer Illyanna Maisonet called out what she viewed as hypocrisy in Bon Appétit's solidarity effort, Insider's Anneta Konstantinides reported. Maisonet recalled that she pitched a story to the publication "about Afro-Boricuas that make regional rice fritters" — a pitch she said an editor rejected, reasoning it sounded like "a story that could have been told 5 years ago."
Bon Appétit went on to publish "another Euro-ingredient story," she wrote.
—illyanna Maisonet (@eatgordaeat) June 4, 2020
In a since-deleted Instagram post featuring a screenshot of her tweet, Maisonet elaborated on her concerns with Bon Appétit and its social-media activism.
"So, before we go praising them for patting themselves on the back for showing 'solidarity' during a time when it would be bad for business to NOT show solidarity… maybe we can get some full print issues of the regional foods of Puerto Rico," she wrote. "Oh, and Africa. Brazil. Basically, the entire f---ing Diaspora. BY people from the Diaspora." (...)
"I'm definitely certain listing your three POC staff token writers (two of which are white presenting) is helpful in ensuring I am aware of the 'diversity' BA HAS shown," Maisonet responded. "But I get that their avenues are less congested when it comes to getting ideas accepted, as they are staffers. That still doesn't deflect from the fact that you don't have any Puerto Rican stories or recipes."
The screenshots of the messages elicited a strong response on Twitter.
"He himself just listed BA's tokenization problem yet doesn't see it as a problem?" one commenter wrote."
All 243 of Taylor Swift’s Songs, Ranked
Images: Christie Goodwin; SIPA/Shutterstock
[ed. I've heard she's kind of popular. Some fans even know all the words.]
Wednesday, February 21, 2024
It's Apple's Vision Pro, The Rest of Us Just Live Here
Today I’m writing about the two major events this year for Apple. The first is the release of the remarkable Apple Vision Pro, and the second is a likely antitrust suit against the computing giant. How augmented and virtual reality, aka ‘spatial computing,’ reshuffles our society will in many ways be up to antitrust enforcers.
If we don’t handle Apple properly, not only will we deploy what should be a wonderful technology in soul-crushing ways, but we may even bring closer a war with China. On the other hand, nothing is inevitable, and this new platform could actually reverse a lot of the bad dynamics we see in our culture. So yes, the stakes are high.
To understand the full extent of Apple’s power, I’m going to discuss my brief experience with the Vision Pro, sketch out Apple’s history, and then walk through the new device’s supply chain, to where the sophisticated M2 chip that powers this headset is made. (...)
The Apple Vision Pro headset looks like a genuine technological inflection point. It’s hard to overstate the hype about the device. ‘Absolutely Bonkers.’ ‘I normally don’t call tech things sort of magical or surreal like this but...’ ‘The most mind-blowing piece of tech I’ve ever tried.’ ‘Wearing the Vision Pro for hours on end will call into question what it means to compute, but also, what it means to live in the real world.’ And on and on…
I want one. I probably won’t buy one for awhile, for reasons I’ll get into, but it’s clear that Meta, and then Apple, have legitimized a whole new layer of computing with fantastic world-changing possibilities. And if there’s a killer application, then augmented and virtual reality, aka ‘spatial computing,’ will likely become ubiquitous. The most hopeful commentary came from YouTuber Cleo Abram, who pointed out that the technology, if developed properly, could allow us to reconnect with one another and end the epidemic of loneliness that is so pervasive in our fragmented atomistic and monopoly-dominated society.
If targeted advertising and polarized consolidated media and social networks cause us to become alienated from one another, then rich spatial computing could do the opposite. The emphasis, of course, is on the word ‘could.’
There’s another and much darker possibility.
If we don’t handle Apple properly, not only will we deploy what should be a wonderful technology in soul-crushing ways, but we may even bring closer a war with China. On the other hand, nothing is inevitable, and this new platform could actually reverse a lot of the bad dynamics we see in our culture. So yes, the stakes are high.
To understand the full extent of Apple’s power, I’m going to discuss my brief experience with the Vision Pro, sketch out Apple’s history, and then walk through the new device’s supply chain, to where the sophisticated M2 chip that powers this headset is made. (...)
The Apple Vision Pro headset looks like a genuine technological inflection point. It’s hard to overstate the hype about the device. ‘Absolutely Bonkers.’ ‘I normally don’t call tech things sort of magical or surreal like this but...’ ‘The most mind-blowing piece of tech I’ve ever tried.’ ‘Wearing the Vision Pro for hours on end will call into question what it means to compute, but also, what it means to live in the real world.’ And on and on…
I want one. I probably won’t buy one for awhile, for reasons I’ll get into, but it’s clear that Meta, and then Apple, have legitimized a whole new layer of computing with fantastic world-changing possibilities. And if there’s a killer application, then augmented and virtual reality, aka ‘spatial computing,’ will likely become ubiquitous. The most hopeful commentary came from YouTuber Cleo Abram, who pointed out that the technology, if developed properly, could allow us to reconnect with one another and end the epidemic of loneliness that is so pervasive in our fragmented atomistic and monopoly-dominated society.
If targeted advertising and polarized consolidated media and social networks cause us to become alienated from one another, then rich spatial computing could do the opposite. The emphasis, of course, is on the word ‘could.’
There’s another and much darker possibility.
by Matt Stoller, BIG | Read more:
Video: YouTube
[ed. It really is a very cool technology. I imagine the off-putting ski goggle-type weirdness of the headset will be resolved fairly quickly, much like early smartphone designs (brick to pocket device). Widespread adoption will likely follow, bringing down pricing. Whether this leads to Zuckerberg's metaverse vision or something else is still an open question.]
An America of Secrets
An America of Secrets (New Atlantis)
"There have been two dominant narratives about the rise of misinformation and conspiracy theories in American public life.
What we can, without prejudice, call the establishment narrative — put forward by dominant foundations, government agencies, NGOs, the mainstream press, the RAND corporation — holds that the misinformation age was launched by the Internet boom, the loss of media gatekeepers, new alternative sources of sensational information that cater to niche audiences, and social media. According to this story, the Internet in general and social media in particular reward telling audiences what they want to hear and undermining faith in existing institutions. A range of nefarious actors, from unscrupulous partisan media to foreign intelligence agencies, all benefit from algorithms that are designed to boost engagement, which winds up catering misinformation to specific audience demands. Traditional journalism, bound by ethics, has not been able to keep up.
The alternative narrative — put forward by Fox News, the populist fringes of the Left and the Right, Substackers of all sorts — holds almost the inverse. For decades, mainstream political discourse in America has been controlled by the chummy relationship between media, political, and economic elites. These actors, caught up in trading information, access, and influence with each other, fed the American people a thoroughly sanitized and limited picture of the world. But now, their dominance is being broken by the Internet, and all of the dirty laundry is being aired. In this view, “misinformation” and “conspiracy theory” are simply the establishment’s slanders for inconvenient truths it can no longer suppress. Whether it’s the Biden administration establishing a Disinformation Governance Board within the Department of Homeland Security or the New York Times’s Kevin Roose calling for a federal “reality czar,” the establishment is desperate to put the Humpty Dumpty of controlled consensus reality back together again.
As opposed as they seem, in fact both of these narratives are right, so far as they go. But neither of them captures the underlying truth. There is indeed a dark matter ripping the country apart, shredding our shared sense of reality and faith in our democratic government. But this dark matter is not misinformation, it isn’t conspiracy theories, and it isn’t the establishment, exactly. It is secrecy. (...)
As a drip-drip-drip of shocking revelations on a decades-long time lag inflict a Chinese water torture on our political psyche, we have witnessed a slow but steady rise in paranoia and conspiracy thinking in American public life. All of this is the predictable outcome of a national security state of immense scale operating amid a political system like ours, which leads to a clash between two essential principles — bureaucratic self-protection and democratic openness."
by Jon Askonas, The New Atlantis | Read more:
Image: Hannah Yoest
[ed. From the series: Reality: A Post-MortemWhat Happened to Consensus Reality?
- Reality Is Just a Game Now
- How Stewart Made Tucker
- What Was the Fact?
- An America of Secrets
Tuesday, February 20, 2024
Why Biden Matters
Biden matters because he is taking on the real problems that are wrecking America, the deep structural problems, created over decades, that benefit powerful people who will do anything to prevent change (the way fossil fuel companies do anything to block climate solutions that hurt profits). He is the first president since LBJ to take on problems that big.
“How can that be?” you ask. “Joe Biden hasn’t transformed the Middle East into peaceful democracies like George W. Bush did. Nor has he ended racial and partisan animosity in America like Barack Obama did, or drained the swamp like Donald Trump did. What has Biden done?” He has taken on a challenge as big as his three predecessors’ ambitions: breaking corporate monopoly power and restoring healthy competition.
“Competition policy” is the innocuous name for this program. It’s big because it seeks to cure the root malady ailing America. Obviously, I was being sarcastic about the successes of Biden’s predecessors: they got nowhere on their signature ambitions, because they did not even try. Bush’s program for the Iraq transition was an arrogant experiment in free-market fantasy, uninterested in democracy. Obama announced in an apology letter to supporters after winning the nomination that he was not going to change our corrupt and toxic politics. (I wrote a Daily Kos piece about it in July 2008.) And Trump, as the very embodiment of the swamp, would no more drain the swamp than a bullfrog would. But Biden is serious.
Look at the ambitiousness of Biden’s people. “She was put in this role to shake things up” is a profile of Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission. She is one of a group of Biden appointees to key offices, including Jonathan Kanter (DOJ Antitrust), Gary Gensler (SEC), and Rohit Chopra (CFPB). Their task is to promote competition (the source of all capitalism’s benefits), mainly by breaking monopolies. The people Biden chose for this task are not timid, half-ass compromisers (unlike every other political appointee of the last fifty-five years who got put anywhere near the real problems). As the Khan profile puts it, they are people “who think excessive corporate power lies at the root of most social ills,” and they are absolutely correct.
The effects of excessive corporate power spill everywhere, and Biden is aligning the whole government with his July 2021 Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy: “The Order includes 72 initiatives by more than a dozen federal agencies.” Party leaders (and big donors) are resisting this radical new direction (or return to basics) for the Democratic Party. But from net neutrality to stopping meatpackers’ domination of farmers, from the right to repair to the uses of personal data, Biden is challenging monopoly power. If you want to know why American health care is bizarrely expensive yet also incompetent, why baby formula can stay out of stock for three desperate months due to a single plant having troubles, why we can’t meet our own semiconductor needs, why we can’t build electric vehicle charging stations at anything like a reasonable pace, why college costs so much, why the Pentagon’s contractors can’t build new weapons systems that are completed before they’re obsolete, why labor unions in America got crushed and wages for most of us have stagnated for fifty years, why rents are exorbitant, why a computer glitch in one airline can practically shut down air travel for a day, if you wonder about these and a thousand other small (and large) constant hits to the quality of our daily lives, the answer to your question is monopoly power. Even the headline-grabbing disasters—wars, environmental catastrophes, refugee migrations—are always partly, and often mostly, driven by excessive corporate power.
Too Big to Fail
Saying Biden has taken on this fundamental problem doesn’t mean he is solving it. But he is, slowly. Progress is difficult because the forces arrayed in support of monopoly power are entrenched in every institution of our society, and they have controlled government policy (and government appointments) for as long as anyone can remember. Reagan blessed the Chicago School’s “big is good, big is efficient” mantra, pretty much ending antitrust enforcement for forty years. Corporate concentration exploded. Now, every senior official, every manager, every judge, in every large business and institution in our country has spent their entire career in a culture that took unchecked corporate power as a simple fact of life, the iron law of our economy. And all of this was tacit, complex, and hidden from the American public. Until the Great Recession. The 2008 meltdown brought the concept of “too big to fail” into the public’s consciousness, as big banks stole six trillion dollars of middle-class home equity and not a single executive (or even flunky) was prosecuted. But now we know.
“Too big to fail” started the slow burn among citizens that finally allowed the anti-monopoly movement (crying in the wilderness for decades) to get some traction. The movement now has real power because Biden supports it. The FTC has begun blocking mergers and the DOJ is prosecuting anticompetitive behavior. The formerly unchallenged lords of the universe were caught flat-footed, because they always before had a veto on those dweeby, goody-two-shoes anti-monopolists getting into office. And they are furious. (...)
Taking on monopolies has produced a string of accomplishments. The hearing aid monopoly was broken and prices plummeted. Insulin prices are capped at $35 a month. Pay-day lender interest rates are capped at somewhere around 40 percent, rather than the hundreds of percent interest these predators were charging (specifically, their loophole around state caps was closed). Non-compete clauses that block ordinary employees from changing jobs, or negotiating on fair terms with their bosses, are being outlawed. Mandatory arbitration that deprives employees of the right to take grievances to court are starting to head that way, too. Mergers and acquisitions have tanked. Private equity sharks are laying off staff. Those infuriating “junk fees” tacked onto bank accounts, tickets, hotels, and everything else are being exposed and curtailed.
Monopoly is so destructive that just beginning to challenge it produces a wealth of small benefits. But they are small, and they will be temporary, unless the system that enables monopolies is changed down deep.
“How can that be?” you ask. “Joe Biden hasn’t transformed the Middle East into peaceful democracies like George W. Bush did. Nor has he ended racial and partisan animosity in America like Barack Obama did, or drained the swamp like Donald Trump did. What has Biden done?” He has taken on a challenge as big as his three predecessors’ ambitions: breaking corporate monopoly power and restoring healthy competition.
Look at the ambitiousness of Biden’s people. “She was put in this role to shake things up” is a profile of Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission. She is one of a group of Biden appointees to key offices, including Jonathan Kanter (DOJ Antitrust), Gary Gensler (SEC), and Rohit Chopra (CFPB). Their task is to promote competition (the source of all capitalism’s benefits), mainly by breaking monopolies. The people Biden chose for this task are not timid, half-ass compromisers (unlike every other political appointee of the last fifty-five years who got put anywhere near the real problems). As the Khan profile puts it, they are people “who think excessive corporate power lies at the root of most social ills,” and they are absolutely correct.
The effects of excessive corporate power spill everywhere, and Biden is aligning the whole government with his July 2021 Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy: “The Order includes 72 initiatives by more than a dozen federal agencies.” Party leaders (and big donors) are resisting this radical new direction (or return to basics) for the Democratic Party. But from net neutrality to stopping meatpackers’ domination of farmers, from the right to repair to the uses of personal data, Biden is challenging monopoly power. If you want to know why American health care is bizarrely expensive yet also incompetent, why baby formula can stay out of stock for three desperate months due to a single plant having troubles, why we can’t meet our own semiconductor needs, why we can’t build electric vehicle charging stations at anything like a reasonable pace, why college costs so much, why the Pentagon’s contractors can’t build new weapons systems that are completed before they’re obsolete, why labor unions in America got crushed and wages for most of us have stagnated for fifty years, why rents are exorbitant, why a computer glitch in one airline can practically shut down air travel for a day, if you wonder about these and a thousand other small (and large) constant hits to the quality of our daily lives, the answer to your question is monopoly power. Even the headline-grabbing disasters—wars, environmental catastrophes, refugee migrations—are always partly, and often mostly, driven by excessive corporate power.
Too Big to Fail
Saying Biden has taken on this fundamental problem doesn’t mean he is solving it. But he is, slowly. Progress is difficult because the forces arrayed in support of monopoly power are entrenched in every institution of our society, and they have controlled government policy (and government appointments) for as long as anyone can remember. Reagan blessed the Chicago School’s “big is good, big is efficient” mantra, pretty much ending antitrust enforcement for forty years. Corporate concentration exploded. Now, every senior official, every manager, every judge, in every large business and institution in our country has spent their entire career in a culture that took unchecked corporate power as a simple fact of life, the iron law of our economy. And all of this was tacit, complex, and hidden from the American public. Until the Great Recession. The 2008 meltdown brought the concept of “too big to fail” into the public’s consciousness, as big banks stole six trillion dollars of middle-class home equity and not a single executive (or even flunky) was prosecuted. But now we know.
“Too big to fail” started the slow burn among citizens that finally allowed the anti-monopoly movement (crying in the wilderness for decades) to get some traction. The movement now has real power because Biden supports it. The FTC has begun blocking mergers and the DOJ is prosecuting anticompetitive behavior. The formerly unchallenged lords of the universe were caught flat-footed, because they always before had a veto on those dweeby, goody-two-shoes anti-monopolists getting into office. And they are furious. (...)
Taking on monopolies has produced a string of accomplishments. The hearing aid monopoly was broken and prices plummeted. Insulin prices are capped at $35 a month. Pay-day lender interest rates are capped at somewhere around 40 percent, rather than the hundreds of percent interest these predators were charging (specifically, their loophole around state caps was closed). Non-compete clauses that block ordinary employees from changing jobs, or negotiating on fair terms with their bosses, are being outlawed. Mandatory arbitration that deprives employees of the right to take grievances to court are starting to head that way, too. Mergers and acquisitions have tanked. Private equity sharks are laying off staff. Those infuriating “junk fees” tacked onto bank accounts, tickets, hotels, and everything else are being exposed and curtailed.
Monopoly is so destructive that just beginning to challenge it produces a wealth of small benefits. But they are small, and they will be temporary, unless the system that enables monopolies is changed down deep.
by Jerry Cayford, 3QD | Read more:
Image: Biden: Mueller / MSC, CC BY 3.0 DE; Brandeis: Harris & Ewing, photographer, Public domain; both via Wikimedia Commons[ed. Not sure how much Biden is actually directing policy (or any president, for that matter) - more like his administration, which seems composed of many smart, forward-thinking, pragmatic, well-seasoned staff. That's where success (and progress) lays. Contrast to Trump, who micro-managed every decision and made sure everything flowed through him, whether he knew anything about an issue or not (or the nuances thereof). If you're tired and want to see an executive who's actually smarter than their staff (and most everybody else), see here. The only reasonable choice in my opinion.]
Fred & Luna
Monday, February 19, 2024
President's Day Historian's Survey
President Biden is in a tight race to keep former President Donald Trump from reclaiming the White House, recent polls show. But that's not how 154 historians and presidential experts see it: They rate Biden in the top third of U.S. presidents, while Trump ranks dead last.
The 2024 edition of the Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey has Biden in 14th place, just ahead of Woodrow Wilson and Ronald Reagan. Trump comes in 45th, behind fellow impeachee Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan, the perennial cellar-dweller in such ratings due to his pre-Civil War leadership.
"While partisanship and ideology don't tend to make a major difference overall, there are a few distinctions worth noting," said political scientists Brandon Rottinghaus of the University of Houston and Justin S. Vaughn of Coastal Carolina University, who first published their greatness survey in 2015.
The 2024 edition of the Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey has Biden in 14th place, just ahead of Woodrow Wilson and Ronald Reagan. Trump comes in 45th, behind fellow impeachee Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan, the perennial cellar-dweller in such ratings due to his pre-Civil War leadership.
"While partisanship and ideology don't tend to make a major difference overall, there are a few distinctions worth noting," said political scientists Brandon Rottinghaus of the University of Houston and Justin S. Vaughn of Coastal Carolina University, who first published their greatness survey in 2015.
Experts responding to the survey who self-identified as conservatives rated Biden No. 30, while liberals put him 13th and moderates ranked him 20th. All three of those same groups ranked Trump, whose presidency was marked by his flouting of historical norms, in the bottom five.
On the survey's 0-100 scale of "overall greatness," a rating of 50 means a president was average, while zero means a president is considered a failure. Only the top three presidents — Abraham Lincoln at No. 1, followed by Franklin D. Roosevelt and then George Washington — scored above 90. The drop-off was sharp from there, with no one else above an 80 rating. Roughly half the presidents were rated below 50.
Trump's overall rating was 10.92, easily the worst showing, while Biden's 62.66 had him tied with John Adams. Some of Biden's appeal could be due to the person he followed in the Oval Office: Trump was seen as "by far the most polarizing of the ranked presidents, selected by 170 respondents," according to a summary of the survey.
The survey emerges as these two contenders for the 2024 presidential race are running against distinctly different headwinds. While historians might prefer Biden, polls show a lack of confidence in his handling of key policy areas, and he is routinely criticized over his age. And Trump is romping his way to another Republican nomination to lead the U.S. despite facing 91 felony criminal counts and lingering disapproval over his one-term presidency.
In a sign of partisan divide, the academics wrote, "Republicans and Conservatives rank George Washington as the greatest president," while Democrats, moderates and independents slotted the nation's founding president in second or third place.
"There are also several presidents where partisan polarization is evident — Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Obama, and Biden — but interestingly not for Bill Clinton," the survey's authors said.
In fact, Clinton fared a bit better among right-leaning respondents, who put him at No. 10, than among liberals and moderates, both of whom had Clinton as the 12th-best president.
Measuring presidential greatness is, of course, both subjective and selective. Historians routinely reanalyze leaders' successes and failures — and in today's polarized political climate, those qualities can look very different, depending on whom you ask. It can also be difficult to extract distinct criteria for presidential greatness, other than helming the United States during critical moments in history — such as helping found the country or keeping the nation together.
On the survey's 0-100 scale of "overall greatness," a rating of 50 means a president was average, while zero means a president is considered a failure. Only the top three presidents — Abraham Lincoln at No. 1, followed by Franklin D. Roosevelt and then George Washington — scored above 90. The drop-off was sharp from there, with no one else above an 80 rating. Roughly half the presidents were rated below 50.
Trump's overall rating was 10.92, easily the worst showing, while Biden's 62.66 had him tied with John Adams. Some of Biden's appeal could be due to the person he followed in the Oval Office: Trump was seen as "by far the most polarizing of the ranked presidents, selected by 170 respondents," according to a summary of the survey.
The survey emerges as these two contenders for the 2024 presidential race are running against distinctly different headwinds. While historians might prefer Biden, polls show a lack of confidence in his handling of key policy areas, and he is routinely criticized over his age. And Trump is romping his way to another Republican nomination to lead the U.S. despite facing 91 felony criminal counts and lingering disapproval over his one-term presidency.
In a sign of partisan divide, the academics wrote, "Republicans and Conservatives rank George Washington as the greatest president," while Democrats, moderates and independents slotted the nation's founding president in second or third place.
"There are also several presidents where partisan polarization is evident — Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Obama, and Biden — but interestingly not for Bill Clinton," the survey's authors said.
In fact, Clinton fared a bit better among right-leaning respondents, who put him at No. 10, than among liberals and moderates, both of whom had Clinton as the 12th-best president.
Measuring presidential greatness is, of course, both subjective and selective. Historians routinely reanalyze leaders' successes and failures — and in today's polarized political climate, those qualities can look very different, depending on whom you ask. It can also be difficult to extract distinct criteria for presidential greatness, other than helming the United States during critical moments in history — such as helping found the country or keeping the nation together.
by Bill Chappell, NPR | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. I'm assuming this survey was based not only on the policies of those presidents, but how their policies worked out. Personally, I wouldn't rate Clinton so highly.]
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