It doesn’t really work for monks to appear in this installment of the series, seeing as how the influence of the Catholic Church on popular art movements had really waned by 1848, but I’ve already committed to the general conceit, so.
MONK #1: ok wow
what should we draw what should we drawww
everybody’s doing landscapes and rich ladies in front of old buildings so maybe we should – MONK #2: bitches MONK #1: what MONK #2: we gotta paint bitches
just stone cold bitches man MONK #1: i dont understand MONK #2: bitches are it
bitches are the future
people want one thing from art
and that’s to see unsmiling, lush bitches brushing their hair MONK #1: wow
ok MONK #2: like this
MONK #1: oh wow okay yeah i see what you mean MONK #2: or this
MONK #1: okay so like this?
MONK #2: um
you know what
that’s a really good start MONK #1: thank you! MONK #2: something i really like about it is the moon
and the veil is great
and she looks like she might have consumption
which is great MONK #1: thank you!!! MONK #2: but that’s a woman
not a bitch
you didn’t paint a bitch
so MONK #1: oh man MONK #2: no no it’s okay don’t feel bad
it can be tricky
here’s another example
just for reference
MONK #1: ok let me see if ive got it yet
how’s this
MONK #2: hmm MONK #1: oh dang MONK #2: haha dont be so hard on yourself i’m just thinking
this is definitely better MONK #1: yeah? MONK #2: yeah MONK #1: i feel like im getting closer MONK #2: you definitely definitely are
she’s not smiling and that’s a great start
don’t really see any jewels though MONK #1: yeah MONK #2: remember your aiming for this
MONK #1: WHOA MONK #2: haha yeah
big hair, no heart, that’s the key
MONK #2: tell you what
lets practice some
ill give you a general activity
and you guess how a bitch might look while she was doing it
okay? MONK #1: okay MONK #2: i really think it will help MONK #1: okay MONK #2: gathering flowers MONK #1: i guess
peaceful? MONK #2: furious MONK #1: dang MONK #2: bitches gather flowers furiously
MONK #2: lets try another one
picnicking
how do bitches picnic MONK #1: um
angry? MONK #2: solemnly
they picnic solemnly, in billowing velvet capes
MONK #2: okay
we’re picking flowers again
what’s happening MONK #1: um
they’re picking flowers
gravely
like for a funeral MONK #2: right!
is anybody smiling or having a good time? MONK #1: no
definitely not MONK #2: you got it kid
MONK #2: sitting in a castle MONK #1: mega pissed off MONK #2: that’s the one!!
MONK #2: okay bitches are swimming
set the scene for me MONK #1: they’re trying to drown a guy
but real slowly MONK #2: yes
that is exactly how bitches swim
MONK #2: how about dancing
what do bitches look like when they throw a dance party MONK #1: enormously sad
just shatteringly grief-stricken MONK #2: that’s right
bitches hate dancing
MONK #2: okay i think you’re ready to try again
lightning round
draw me a bitch in front of her house MONK #1: ok hows this MONK #2: is that a spear? MONK #1: yeah MONK #2: NICE
MONK #2: gimme two bitches MONK #1: hows this MONK #2: YES
I LOVE HOW SHE’S STARING AT ME
MONK #2: show me what it looks like when two people fall in love MONK #1: like this? MONK #2: YES THAT’S HORRIFYING GOD YES
MONK #2: what does it look like when a bitch goes on a date MONK #1: ahh
she
she carries her dog and won’t look at the guy MONK #2: you are ready
MONK #2: last one
show me a happy couple on a carriage ride MONK #1: okay MONK #2: CHRIST THAT’S UNSETTLING
is he missing part of his jaw? MONK #1: yeah i thought it fit the scene MONK #2: this is great stuff MONK #1: you really think so? MONK #2: i really do
MONK #1: okay um how about this one MONK #2: YES
THATS IT
YOU GOT IT MONK #1: really??
oh man MONK #2: absolutely
this is it
we’re done here
lets call it the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and go get some opium
True story: Sansa gets a spinoff and becomes Black Widow
"There are people who could never commit murder; I am not one of those people. It’s better to know it, better to know who you are, and what lies in you, and what you could do, might do, under extreme provocation.” ― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
British pop sensation Sam Smith, who came out of the closet last week in an interview with The Fader magazine after dropping a suggestive video for his track "Leave Your Lover", has teamed up with the one and only Mary J. Blige for a new version of his stunning track "Stay With Me".
They're debuting the new version this morning on Good Morning America but you can listen here.
You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.
Best tweet ever, Mr Cumstien. I read this, by the way, in a coffee shop in Soho where they don’t have a restroom! Another NYC specialty. From the inevitable backlash from the in-tray:
I am a loyal Dish reader, but I cannot stand your consistent whining about NYC. New York is the only true city in America. It’s diversity, creativity, density, wealth, and knowledge cannot be matched. Even with it’s problems of income inequality, stop and frisk, and a lack of affordable housing, NYC is still one of the greatest engines for social mobility and creativity in the world. The five boroughs of New York represent the American ideal more than any other place in the US. In no other place in this country do you see a welcoming of people, ideas, and the sharing of public space in the way you see it in NYC. New York is an egalitarian city by nature, forcing people to share the streets, subways, and public places. Humanity comes to New York to express itself. If you don’t like New York, you don’t like people.
New York has never been easy, but what good things in life are?
DC is a suburb and a one-industry town. To compare DC – or for that matter any city in the US – to NYC would be like comparing foie gras to dog food; at first glance they may seem the same but in reality they are worlds apart. So as Jimmy Walker said so many years ago, “I’d rather be a lamppost in New York than the Mayor of Chicago” – and let’s face it, Chicago is a better city than DC.
The blog is great. Your views on NYC are suspect.
I’m sorry but my point is simply about the livability of the city. And when people say that NYC is the only true city in America, or that “humanity comes to New York to express itself,” I have to say it sounds like a cult not a judgment. And you do need something of a cult mentality to put up with all the horrendous hassle. Chicago, in my view, is the quintessential American city. You can smoke weed legally in Denver. You could get gay-married in Iowa before NYC. What Los Angeles offers in terms of livability and climate knocks New York into the dust. DC is – especially now – cleaner, more modern, more livable and also culturally rich. San Francisco is far more beautiful; New Orleans far more exotic. New York is an amazing place – but it is a gigantic, chaotic, incompetent mess. Another reader turns the tables:
The last time I stayed in DC, the hotel’s fire alarm went off around 4am. Loud speakers were announcing that the hotel should be evacuated. People were wandering around the halls in their bathrobes looking for an exit. I was standing on the sidewalk outside the hotel when I learned that the evacuation was due to a small, contained, grease fire in a basement kitchen.
You live in DC and don’t stay in its hotels. You know the city and know when a cab driver is going blocks out of the way and you don’t have to rely on Google Maps. And, of course, no such thing would happen in Chicago, Paris, Rome or to anyone visiting DC. Everywhere has its pros and cons.
I love ya. And one of the reasons I do is because you make me want to slap you now and then – no different than the few I hold as close friends.
Another has the right idea:
I can’t wait ’til you get to Provincetown and chill the fuck out for a while.
Update from another:
Your reader is wrong; DC is not a one-industry town. I grew up there and neither of my parents worked for the government. And it’s not a suburb. A suburb to what city? His precious NYC. I might be biased because I grew up in Alexandria, but DC is an amazing city with a lot to offer. And so much of it is free. Yes, it can be argued that it is more of a town than a city, but that’s the best part. You can see the sky, and live in an apartment or condo or house all in the same city. You can have a lawn and be in the city limits. And just like every other American city, there is the depressing economic apartheid, but at least you don’t have to be in your 20s and willing to live in a hole or be super fucking wealthy to enjoy it. Yes, the Beltway fucking blows, but driving on Rock Creek Parkway makes up for it. And when you go into a deli and order breakfast you aren’t snarled at by other patrons for not spitting out your order fast enough. Ordering food as a tourist in NYC is panic inducing.
Another:
Chicago, in my view, is the quintessential American city.”
AMEN. I tell all the foreigners I know who are planning on visiting the US: if you only have one week in America, spend four days in Chicago (and two days at the Grand Canyon.) Chicago is a perfect microcosm of the entire American experience: a big industrial port city with a huge immigrant population and a vibrant African-American community. Somehow it is midwestern, northern, coastal, and a little bit southern (all those Kentucky transplants, plus great soul food) all at the same time. It even feels a little Canadian in places. OK, it lacks the fresh-scrubbed natural beauty of western cities like SLC or Seattle, but you do get a taste of it — Chicago was once at the edge of the frontier, too. Great music scene and global cuisine, but with strong regional roots. Museums and sport stadiums and other touristy stuff up the wazoo.
Importantly: its suburbs sprawl endlessly, as do all American cities, so you get the quintessentially American experience of driving hours across the sprawl to get somewhere (just like LA!) — but with decent trains if you hate driving. Other cities, like Boston, New Orleans, LA, San Francisco and even, yes, NYC are tiny nations unto themselves. Boston is Boston (and New England) before it is America. NYC in particular is a city of the world before it is anything else. But every time you turn around in Chicago, you’ll see AMERICA.
In case you missed it, Elizabeth Minkel is bothered by “ICYMI”:
I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve seen someone apologize for sharing something “old” that was published 48 hours prior. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve seen something interesting and completely un-timely and thought about sharing it, only to stop myself when I noticed it had been published a year or two ago. And I’ve lost track of the number of times when I’ve seen a piece – or, for that matter, written a piece – that seems to fall flat because it came out a week or two after the bulk of an internet maelstrom.
“In Case You Missed It” makes the feeling explicit. It’s hard for a lot of us to fight the compulsion to stay up-to-the-minute – in reality, it’s impossible, but it somehow seems achievable. ICYMI makes staying connected feel like a constant game of catch-up, like finding things at a slower pace warrants some kind of disclaimer.
I’m not the first to complain about the unrelenting pace of information online, or the method of its delivery.
“The Stream,” the chronological endless scrolling nature of the present web—one new notification, one new notification – rose to prominence about five years ago. Alexis Madrigal wrote beautifully about our sense of time online last December, the valorization of “nowness,” how the next tweet inherently trumps what came before it: … We feel overwhelmed because we crave endings, and the Internet has no end. “And now, who can keep up?” Madrigal writes. “There is a melancholy to the infinite scroll.” ICYMI is a tacit acknowledgement of that psychological finish line, always being moved an inch more out of reach – I can feel it now, chipping away at me.
The Dish makes a habit of posting new material as quickly as possible after its publication, to bring you the freshest yet most comprehensive take on an issue. If we get around to certain pieces too long after their publication date, we often pass on them. But that drive towards nowness is balanced by our constant linking back to material from the archives, to feature the old alongside the new.
If you had told most Democrats in 2010 that by the time the 2014 election rolled around Obamacare would have rolled out with lower premiums and higher enrollment than anyone projected they would have been thrilled. They knew when they passed the law that it was going to be a political loser in the 2010 election but they figured that if they could just get it up-and-running — and insuring millions of people — it would be a winner in future elections. And perhaps it will be. But the definition of “future” keeps getting pushed out. Obamacare is working, but not for Democrats.
But the Kentucky Senate race could be a turning point. Drum explains:
[I]t turns out that Obamacare, of all things, is causing [Mitch] McConnell some serious heartburn.
You see, unluckily for McConnell, Kentucky has possibly the best, most popular Obamacare exchange in the country—though nobody calls it an Obamacare exchange, of course, since Obamacare is the work of Satan. It’s called Kynect. Everybody loves Kynect. So when McConnell was asked recently if he favored getting rid of Kynect, he had a problem. It’s Obamacare, and he’s on record favoring the root-and-branch repeal of Obamacare. But Kynect is popular. Nobody wants to see a root-and-branch repeal of Kynect. What to do?
So far, McConnell has taken a creative approach to this dilemma: He basically denies that Kynect has anything to do with Obamacare. McConnell remains in favor of total repeal of Obamacare, but says this wouldn’t cause any problems with Kynect. It would just keep motoring along without missing a beat.
Kynect could not have existed without the Affordable Care Act, and it would cease to exist if the Affordable Care Act ceased to exist. There would be no people eligible for the expanded Medicaid—the large majority of those who signed up through Kynect—and there would be no exchange for people to sign up for affordable private insurance with federal subsidies. Saying that Kynect is unconnected with the ACA or its repeal is just mind-numbingly false. The ACA and Kynect are one in the same.
This is obvious to anyone with a brain. The category of humans with a brain includes McConnell. He’s not that stupid. That leaves only one other choice: hypocritical. Well, two other choices: hypocritical and lying. That is, he knows Kynect can’t exist without the ACA, but he just said it anyway, without any concern for the truth. And the hypocrisy part comes in, of course, because, well, how can he have stood up there for years saying that, no, Americans should not be permitted to get health care the Obama way, and he’s going to strike it down the second he can—but Kentuckians, they’re different?
Democrats can alter the currents of Obamacare politics at key moments, but only if they’re willing to occasionally brave its waters. McConnell’s opponent, Alison Lundergan Grimes, dipped her big toe in those waters Wednesday, but couldn’t ultimately bring herself to dive in with the crucial words “Affordable Care Act.”… Remember, McConnell’s goal is to mislead voters into believing that repealing Obamacare won’t have any bearing on Kynect. And his plan will only work if voters are confused about the connection between the two. Thus, Grimes can only close the loop by making it clear that repealing Obamacare is the thing that will destroy Kynect even if that means making common cause with the Affordable Care Act.
How soon is too soon to begin introducing basic gender theory and Lacanian self-definition to an infant? A primer.
BABY: dont want u
want daddy ME: GENDER IS A SPECTRUM OF BEHAVIORS NOT A FIXED IDENTITY
STOP DENYING MY AGENCY BABY: want juice ME: I’M GONNA READ JUDITH BUTLER TO YOU AGAIN
BABY: [nurses] ME: you realize youre literally consuming me BABY: [nurses] ME: wow
its like de Beauvoir never even wrote The Second Sex
[leans over baby's crib] ME: DON’T YOU DARE DEVELOP ALONG FREUDIAN STAGES BABY: [sleeps] ME: ARE YOU IGNORING MY REGULATIVE DISCOURSES
BABY: [sleeps] ME: wow
have you queered anything today
BABY: [cries] ME: hey
HEY
we have talked about this BABY: [cries] ME: what is the function of the imaginary primordial enclosure formed by the imago of the mother’s body
you know this
i know you know this
ME: i dont care how you express your future sexuality
but dont you dare bring a post-structuralist into this house BABY: [chortles] ME: THIS IS SERIOUS
ME: IS GENDER A PERFORMANCE OR A CONSTRUCT
PUT DOWN THAT BUNNY AND ANSWER ME
ME: [holding car keys] okay, Baby
show me the difference between the symbol and the archetype BABY: [claps] ME: come on
what’s being displaced here
BABY: want fahh
want fahhh ME: who wants fahh? BABY: want fahh ME: Is it I?
Are you learning the function of the I?
Are you ready for Lacan’s mirror stage? BABY: want fahhh ME: I didn’t think so
BABY: [eats a Cheerio] ME: WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO REALIZE
THAT ‘THE REAL’ IS NOT NECESSARILY COEXISTENT WITH REALITY
BABY: [hands me 'Are You My Mother'] ME: DO YOU WANT ME TO READ THIS TO YOU
OR ARE YOU FINALLY READY TO CRITICALLY INTERROGATE THE TEXT BABY: book
Maya Angelou has died. The list of jobs she held over the course of her life is astounding:
She became a poet and writer after a series of occupations as a young adult, including fry cook, prostitute, night-club dancer and performer, cast-member of the opera Porgy and Bess, coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and journalist in Egypt and Ghana during the days of decolonization. She was an actor, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs. Since 1982, she taught at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she holds the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies. She was active in the Civil Rights movement, and worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Since the 1990s she made around eighty appearances a year on the lecture circuit, something she continued into her eighties. In 1993, Angelou recited her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration, the first poet to make an inaugural recitation sinceRobert Frost at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961.
This is your open thread to discuss her life and body of work and SNL’s delightful, loving tribute to her, “I Know Why The Caged Bird Laughs”:
Also the only one so far where I have read the source material.
“You’re a wizard, Harry,” Hagrid said. “And you’re coming to Hogwarts.”
“What’s Hogwarts?” Harry asked.
“It’s wizard school.”
“It’s not a public school, is it?”
“No, it’s privately run.”
“Good. Then I accept. Children are not the property of the state; everyone who wishes to do so has the right to offer educational goods or services at a fair market rate. Let us leave at once.”
***
“Malfoy bought the whole team brand-new Nimbus Cleansweeps!” Ron said, like a poor person. “That’s not fair!”
“Everything that is possible is fair,” Harry reminded him gently. “If he is able to purchase better equipment, that is his right as an individual. How is Draco’s superior purchasing ability qualitatively different from my superior Snitch-catching ability?”
“I guess it isn’t,” Ron said crossly.
Harry laughed, cool and remote, like if a mountain were to laugh. “Someday you’ll understand, Ron.”
***
Professor Snape stood at the front of the room, sort of Jewishly. “There will be no foolish wand-waving or silly incantations in this class. As such, I don’t expect many of you to appreciate the subtle science and exact art that is potion-making. However, for those select few who possess, the predisposition…I can teach you how to bewitch the mind and ensnare the senses. I can tell you how to bottle fame, brew glory, and even put a stopper in death.”
Harry’s hand shot up.
“What is it, Potter?” Snape asked, irritated.
“What’s the value of these potions on the open market?”
“What?”
“Why are you teaching children how to make these valuable products for ourselves at a schoolteacher’s salary instead of creating products to meet modern demand?”
“You impertinent boy–”
“Conversely, what’s to stop me from selling these potions myself after you teach us how to master them?”
“I–”
“This is really more of a question for the Economics of Potion-Making, I guess. What time are econ lessons here?”
“We have no economics lessons in this school, you ridiculous boy.”
Harry Potter stood up bravely. “We do now. Come with me if you want to learn about market forces!”
The students poured into the hallway after him. They had a leader at last.
***
Harry and Ron stood before the Mirror of Erised. “My God,” Ron said. “Harry, it’s your dead parents.”
Harry’s eyes flicked momentarily over to the mirror. “So it is. This information is neither useful nor productive. Let us leave at once, to assist Hagrid in his noble enterprise of raising as many dragon eggs as he sees fit, in spite of our country’s unjust dragon-trading restrictions.”
“But it’s your parents, Harry,” Ron said. Ron never really got it.
Harry sighed. “The fundamental standard for all relationships is the trader principle, Ron.”
“I don’t understand,” Ron said.
“Of course you don’t,” said Harry affectionately. “This principle holds that we should interact with people on the basis of the values we can trade with them – values of all sorts, including common interests in art, sports or music, similar philosophical outlooks, political beliefs, sense of life, and more. Dead people have no value according to the trader principle.”
“But they gave birth to y–”
“I made myself, Ron,” Harry said firmly.
***
“Give me your wand, boy,” Voldemort hissed.
“I cannot do that. This wand represents my wealth, which is itself a tangible result of my achievements. Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think,” Harry said bravely.
Voldemort gasped.
“There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.”
Voldemort began to melt. Harry lit a cigarette, because he was the master of fire.
“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. The minimum wage is a tax on the successful. The market will naturally dictate the minimum wage without the government stepping in to determine arbitrary limits.”
Voldemort howled.
“I’m going to sell copies of my wand at an enormous markup,” Harry said, “and you can buy one like everyone else.”
Voldemort had been defeated.
“He hated us for our freedom,” Ron said.
“No, Ron,” Harry said. “He hated us for our free markets.”
Hermione ached with desire for the both of them to master her, but nobody paid her any attention. They had empires to build.
Artwork by Amy Collier, who once saw Fabio at an airport. Fabio is an Italian model who has appeared on many classic romance novels, such as Love Me with Fury, Lovestorm, and More Than a Feeling. He is 6’3” barefoot; usually in cowboy boots.
This looks to me like a view of the Alexandra Bridge that connects Ottawa, Ontario with Gatineau (Hull), Québec, taken on the Gatineau side (call it 2km NE of Parliament Hill). I used to ride my bike along the Ottawa River, on both the Ontario and Québec sides, and this looks familiar, if not 100% right. But I can’t name the building.
Another totally e-mails it in:
The blue banner on the light post is clearly shaped like Vietnam, so (equally clearly) the picture must be from Hanoi.
Another:
I’m pretty sure this is taken from the eastern bank of the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. I feel like I’ve walked on that bridge and that is the fairly new bike path they’ve built. This is my first time entering. I do love the contest. It would be baller to get it right the first time!
Another rookie:
Very first attempt! My guess is Louisville, in the park along the Ohio River, where there is a memorial to Abraham Lincoln. The bridge is a former railway bridge to Indiana, and is now used as a bike or running bridge.
Another stays in the South:
Probably not right, but it looks so damn much like Brown’s Island Park in Richmond, VA. I’ve run on the James River North Bank Trail that ends at that park. The bridge design and river look so insanely like Richmond, but the picture’s just slightly off. Who knows, maybe I’m insanely wrong.
Or wanting to be:
Augusta, Georgia. I hope I’m wrong.
Several others were wrong about the man from Hope:
Clinton Presidential Museum, Little Rock, Arkansas. I knew it the minute I saw the railroad trestle. The museum is nestled just on the edge of Little Rock in one of the prettiest settings. I visited it during an International Master Gardener Conference a few years ago.
Little Rock was the most popular incorrect guess this week. The most popular correct guess attracted 117 entries - a whopping 84% of the total submitted. One of those correct readers:
First impression was: Upper Midwest due to the rail bridge, somewhere in Minnesota or Iowa on the Mississippi. Then I realized way too flat for Saint Paul or Minneapolis and the rest of the Mississippi valley. Usually my gut is right on these things, but a bit of searching for a double-decker bridge brings one to West Sacramento, California.
You’ll have lots of people who’ll get the location, but Google Streetview only has a 2007 photo of the building under construction or a more recent bad angle shot from the street (damn you Google for not having the foresight to send a rogue self driving car to that spot). Nonetheless I’ve attached my guess on the right window. The obsessive Dishheads will spend hours on the angles, cosines, etc, and a few may resort to psychotropics, peak beard, or a bear with a divining rod. Lacking access to any of these I’ll go with with the 6th floor, room 659 and the fat red X. I await being corrected by Doug Chini. But the city location was easy: if a slacker like me can find it in 15 minutes, the heat map of West Sacramento will show one huge blue dot.
He’s sure right about that:
Another reader squeals:
IGotOneIGotOneIGotOne! As all the train-and-bridge spotters have figured out, a Google search of “railroad swing bridge double” served up the “I” Street bridge in Sacramento lickety quick, and maps revealed the 100 Waterfront Place building. I’m sure the pros have already sussed out the latitude, longitude, elevation, time of day, temperature, paint color, bar menu, beagle population and average beard length of the neighborhood, and then taken the rest of the afternoon off for beer and volleyball. They can have it; i’ll just bask in the satisfaction knowing I beat one of these things.
An elaborate visual entry:
Marriage finally pays off for this contestant:
My lovely wife of nearly 40 years is pretty tolerant of me, especially when I call her over to the computer, point at a VFYW picture, and ask where she thinks it is. Usually she just shrugs, says “no idea”, and heads off to more important things. To my amazement, this week she looked at the picture for about 5 seconds and said “I Street Bridge”, not as a question but as a statement. She is a Sacramento native, so I guess I should not be too surprised.
Another goes into detail about one of the central clues:
The first thing I did was search for images of double-decker railroad bridges. The search led within a few minutes to this page showing the I Street Bridge on the site bridgehunter.com. It describes the bridge in detail and includes a photo gallery, map links and street views. (Bridgehunter.com, by the way, looks like it’s going to be an invaluable resource in future window contests involving American bridges.)
From there, identifying the building the window is in was as easy as falling off a piece of cake: California State Teachers’ Retirement System, at 100 Waterfront Pl in West Sacramento, California. This modified Google Earth view shows the angle of the photograph indicating roughly where the window is.
The I Street Bridge, by the way, was completed in 1911; its two decks accommodate rail and highway traffic. It’s of a type known as a swing bridge, which means that the center span of the bridge pivots to allow boats to pass, as seen here:
Several readers flagged this blog post about the I Street Bridge written by California bridge engineer Mark Yashinsky:
A swing railroad bridge has stood at this site since 1858. The current double-deck bridge was built in 1911. Note the round pivot pier supporting the swing span. This bridge is 840 ft long with a 340 ft long swing span. A 34 ft tall boat can pass under it at low tide. Otherwise, the captain must signal to the bridge operator to get through. Boaters need to check with the US Coast Guard when planning a trip to find out the bridge’s hours of operation. …
This is one of the largest center bearing swing bridges ever built. It weighs about 6800 kips. At the turn of the 19th century, such big swing bridges had rim bearings with rollers along the perimeter. When this large bridge was successfully built and operated with a center bearing, no one wanted to go through the trouble of fabricating the conical rollers that supported a rim bearing swing bridge and they were no longer built.
Another reader found an additional bridge resource:
Once more the VFYW contest has been a learning opportunity. I came to realize after some hours of poking about that without a base in bridge terminology, finding this thing wasn’t going to be a snap. I tried every combination I could think of involving steel bridge, railroad-bridge, double-decker, riverwalk, river park. Eventually a likely-but-too-tiny-to-tell icon showed up, and that led me to historicbridges.org, which would have been great if only I’d already known where in the world I thought this bridge was to search their database efficiently. But historicbridges.org introduced me to the descriptors I needed: steel truss bridge, swing bridge. If only I’d known those terms to begin with! A search for “steel truss bridge” delivered the culprit about 200 images down in a few moments of skimming the Google images result, unmistakable (it’s amazing how subtly distinguishable steel truss bridges are one from another, though).
Then I realized that I had ridden Amtrak over that very bridge on my way home to the Bay Area from Manhattan just two months ago.
Another skipped the bridge for a different clue:
Three in a row for me, and a chance to avenge a past near-miss! Early last year I had narrowed a view to Sacramento on little more than hunches, a red curb, and fertile farmland near a sizeable city. But having no luck scanning Google Earth or proof I even had the right city, I called off the search. In my personal tally it wears an asterisk, a badge of shame on my record.
But goddammit, this week we’re straight-up comin’ atcha from the neighboring town of West Sacramento, CA. Nothing fancy this week – didn’t even flex my bridgespotting muscles. Just stared at the letters on the pavement and wrote out twelve blank spaces on a sheet of paper, Wheel of Fortune-style. Funny thing, I was listening to a recording of Bruce Springsteen’s recent Charlotte show when I finally made out what it read: E Street Plaza. A few of those about, but not hard to whittle down.
The pic is from the California Teachers Retirement System Building, seventhish floor. No doubt shot from the employee break room, where somebody recently ate Alice’s sandwich even though she clearly wrote her name on it. Turkey and Swiss with avocado because it’s California.
More word-gaming:
I started with the letters on the walkway. I could tell there are 12 letters, but they were very difficult to make out. Did you know that ‘Extravaganza’ is the only english word I could find with 12 letters and ends with za?
Eventually I went with “streetplaza”, although I could not make out the first letter and had to go through the alphabet until I found a picture of a train trestle crossing a river. It is actually a train/automobile swing bridge – the I Street Bridge – that spans the Sacramento River and connects West Sacramento to Sacramento. One can see Interstate 5 in the background. Based on the shadows the picture was taken in the late morning.
This reader had to step back:
The giveaway clue is the yellow writing – which, in this case, was a “full Monet”: more easily decipherable from a distance, rather than zooming in. I got the “STREET PLAZA” pretty quickly, but what was that first character? It had to be a letter – so my first instinct was to go to DC, but the lack of East Coast buildup suggested otherwise.
I started Google Mapping “[letter] STREET PLAZA”, and discovered that several towns in California are named by single letters – San Diego, Modesto, Merced – and checking for cities with rivers, and especially railroad bridges over them, Sacramento’s E Street Plaza was quickly identifiable!
Another method focused on the economic evidence:
I was pretty certain this was somewhere in the Midwest, based on the flat terrain and old-style railroad trestle. After doing some unsuccessful image searching for railroad bridges in Iowa and Illinois, I started thinking about that riverfront walk. Not just any city can afford to re-do their riverfront like that (with the old-style lightposts, the landscaping and the facilities). This would need to be a medium-sized city with a decent economy to justify that kind of public spending on their riverfront. I started thinking of cities that were focusing on riverfront redevelopment, and as a native Californian, Sacramento popped into my head. Sure enough, that bridge came up at the top of my search, making this one of my fastest (and luckiest) VFYWs yet!
A former winner geeks out with some labels and factoids:
Several peculiar items can be seen in this week’s picture. First, the large tower on the left side of the picture is part of a police communications center. Watch one of the dishes being removed here. Second, in the middle of the picture there seems to be a pipe climbing out of the berm across the river. It turns out to be one of NOAA’s numerous water gauges that monitors river crests and flooding. Third, the faint smokestack on the right hand side of the picture is the Sacramento Tower. Built over a hundred years ago at the city incinerator, it was climbed for the first time by a local rock climber. He dedicated his ascent to the Americans taken hostage by Iran. Slightly odd and inefficient means of communication, but I’m sure the hostages appreciated the gesture.
Another provides some detail about the building:
The photographer took this from CalSTRS, which according to Wikipedia “is the largest teacher’s retirement fund in the US”. It’s also the 8th largest public pension fund in the US. But it pails against the largest public fund in the state – CalPERS, which is #2 over all. CalPERS funding is also a bone of contention here in the state because of the unfunded contributions owed to it by many cities, counties and of course the state itself. Because of these unfunded liabilities, a couple of cities have filled for bankruptcy. Many more might follow.
Another casts a critical eye:
I don’t know much about economics and stuff, but even I know that the pension fund for California’s underpaid state teachers should not be headquartered in a 19-story, $266 million gorgeous monstrosity of glass and steel that was built for the purpose:
I’ll leave it to more qualified readers to say if this is capitalism run amok or socialism run amok, but it’s clearly one or the other, and quite possibly both. Seriously, CALSTRS. When you’re dwarfing the neighbors, and the neighbors happen to live in a ziggurat, that’s when you know you’ve overdone it.
Update from a reader who works at the building:
CalSTRS is the 2nd largest public pension fund in the US (by value of assets), not the 8th. CalPERS is the largest.
As far as socialism or capitalism running amok, I’ll just say that the workers here – a very dedicated lot, in my opinion as an outside consultant in organizational behavior – were in multiple and decrepit quarters before this building was built, and now they are in an environmentally healthy and sustainable building. And the only reason it dwarfs its neighbors is that it’s not in downtown Sacramento. Were it a bit more to the east, it would be dwarfed by a bunch of … wait for it … banks.
Finally, the view was taken from a conference room. The employee break room is in the middle of the floor. Nobody here steals anyone else’s sandwich.
On to the winner selection. The photo was taken from the fifth floor, but as is often the case, many readers wrote that their choice was the fifth floor but then circled a window on another floor. Most of these guesses started with the exterior window and then attempted to discern the floor number incorrectly. The following reader found a useful link for better understanding the layout of the building and which floor is which:
The CALSTRS office was finished in 2007 and was constructed to have low emissions and energy-use, enough so that some researchers at UC-Berkeley used it in a case study of environmentally-friendly building design.
The photo’s submitter said that the window “is in the northeast corner of the building on the 5th floor.” That makes the following reader the only one to guess it exactly right:
We’re looking out at the I Street Bridge. A quick image search for double-decker truss bridges got things narrowed down. I have no idea how the building offices are numbered, but I’m going to guess that this was taken from the 5th floor corner window closest to the river, facing the bridge.
Congrats to our winner on what is essentially an upset over many more experienced players. Among them:
Meanwhile, a former winner writes:
I dunno, 12th floor? Chini’s going to be like, “Well it looks like from the ground it’s about a 65.12265578456132° angle and it was taken about 10 minutes after the submitter, who’s a Scorpio, had a turkey sandwich and a Sprite at their desk, which is located approximately 52 feet from the elevator.” Seriously how has the CIA not contacted him yet? OR HAVE THEY?
Chini, who was actually off by two floors this week, marks his second anniversary with the contest:
The first view I ever found was posted on May 26, 2012 (VFYW #104), so it’s nice that we’ve returned to the state where this odd little journey began two years ago. Back then the contest seemed impossible, so I was disappointed when my entry for that week wasn’t published. But if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again …
Here’s that entry from his first week:
Years of reading the Dish and finally I got one! This week’s VFW shows a row of buildings on Albion Street in Mendocino, California. The picture was taken from the southernmost of three side windows on the second floor of Odd Fellows Hall located at 10480 Kasten Street between Albion and Ukiah, or 39°18’20.01″N and 123°48’5.94″W. Originally built in 1878 as a meeting house, it’s used today primarily for local art exhibitions.
As for locating the reader’s building, the key was the water tower. A Google search for wooden water towers will bring up quite a few in Mendocino, including a view that is a near mirror image of the one your reader submitted. Much like last week’s contest, the buildings’ style threw me off a bit, as my first guess was Maine. (According to Wikipedia the town was settled by former New Englanders who brought their architecture with them, so much so that Mendocino was used as the setting of the fictional Cabot Cove, Maine in the TV show Murder, She Wrote).
Finding the particular window was a bit harder. The rearmost of the three second floor windows is blocked up, but the first two were prime candidates. To choose between them I focused on the reflections of the building’s thin front windows that are faintly visible in your reader’s picture. The rapid increase in their apparent width looking left to right meant that the shot was likely taken from the front-most side window; from a position near the middle side window, those reflections would appear much more uniform in width.
Finally, having never been there, but having been to the Marin Headlands down the coast, it sure seems like a nice place for a getaway weekend!
There's a bridge, a river, a cell phone tower, and cars driving on the right.
You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.
A Brazilian aardvark stole my sandwich at Iguazu Falls and I highly recommend you google some videos of them, they are so bizarre.
by Tracy R. Walsh
Eric Randall shares the story of a high-schooler whose joking edit to Wikipedia became an established truth:
In July of 2008, Dylan Breves, then a 17-year-old student from New York City, made a mundane edit to a Wikipedia entry on the coati. The coati, a member of the raccoon family, is “also known as … a Brazilian aardvark,” Breves wrote. He did not cite a source for this nickname, and with good reason: he had invented it. …
About a year later, Breves searched online for the phrase “Brazilian aardvark.” Not only was his edit still on Wikipedia, but his search brought up hundreds of other Web sites about coatis. References to the so-called “Brazilian aardvark” have since appeared in the Independent, the Daily Mail, and even in a book published by the University of Chicago. Breves’s role in all this seems clear: a Google search for “Brazilian aardvark” will return no mentions before Breves made the edit, in July, 2008. The claim that the coati is known as a Brazilian aardvark still remains on its Wikipedia entry, only now it cites a 2010 article in the Telegraph as evidence.
This kind of feedback loop – wherein an error that appears on Wikipedia then trickles to sources that Wikipedia considers authoritative, which are in turn used as evidence for the original falsehood—is a documented phenomenon. There’s even a Wikipedia article describing it.
(Photo of a baby South American coati by Alex Proimos)
LITTLE ROCK, AR—Reading the signs written in the world around him to divine the course of events as yet unfolded, wise local oracle Phillip McKenna foresaw the arrival of ill weather at a neighborhood barbecue Monday and uttered a sharp warning to t...
Special note: Hey (Ladies)! If you’re in New York, we’ll be doing Hey Ladies: Live! at Housing Works on June 25th. Come! We’ll be giving away prizes and sharing reader stories! It will also be livestreamed as well!
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To: Nicole; Allison; charlotte.smith857@gmail.com; Caitlin; Ashley; Katie; Morgan L.; Jen From: Ali Date: May 8, 2014 Subject: Summertime, summertime sadness
Hey Ladies!!!!
Happy May!!! (Sorry about that whole Cinco de Drinko fiasco, I swear I thought I knew the doorman LOL)
Ok, this may be the most important email I send all year, so PLEASE RESPOND RIGHT AWAY. We need to figure out our summer weekend plans ASAP!!!! We’re closing in on our mid-twenties and I think this is gonna be the summer we all meet our potential first husbands, so location is EVERYTHING!!! Plus Sex and the City. Let’s take a vote!
#KILLIN’ITSUMMER2K14
Amagansett:
Pros: Talkhouse
Cons: I think Mike’s parents have a place there, and Judy and I aren’t on the best terms, and she knows why
Cons: Gwyneth has a place here, and even though she’s a cougar, I feel like we attract the same kinds of dudes, and I don’t want to compete sexually with her
Jersey Shore:
Pros: NONE LOL
Cons: We’ll be in Jersey, just thought I’d throw it out there for Nicole LOL
Martha’s Vineyard/Nantucket:
Pros: Boston boys are SOOOO cute! And might be a nice change of scenery?? Taylor Swift used to summer here when she was dating Conor Kennedy so
Cons: Really far. Would possibly have to relocate for the right LDR
What does everyone think?? I also think it might be dope to just go to Europe (South of France, Ibiza, maybe the Ukraine??) for different weekends during the summer!!
Let me know by COB.
xxAli
“I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but I’m prettttttty!” – Kristin Taekman, Real Housewives
“How many times do I have to tell you / Even when you’re crying you’re beautiful too” – JOHN LEGEND <3 <3 <3
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To: Ali; Allison; charlotte.smith857@gmail.com; Caitlin; Ashley; Katie; Morgan L.; Jen From: Nicole Date: May 8, 2014 Subject: Summertime, summertime sadness
Hey ladies,
Has anyone ever kickstarted a summer vaca? JW…trying to be savvy with money ;)
XO,
Nicole
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To: Ali; Allison; charlotte.smith857@gmail.com; Caitlin; Ashley; Katie; Nicole; Jen From: Morgan L. Date: May 8, 2014 Subject: Summertime, summertime sadness
Hey everyone,
As we all know, my aunt Katherine has a summer house in Nantucket that we’d be able to use. It’s part of her husband’s family estate (note to self: Marry an iBanker like Aunty K!) so like, not sure if his side of the family is using it but it’s 7 BR/5 BATH and right on the beach. I’m thinking we should do this??
But like…
We’d need to follow a few rules (which is fine).
HOUSE RULES (as per Katherine):
1. No shoes in the house
2. Outdoor showers after beach only
3. Don’t use the oven to cook any type of meat product, only the grill
4. Don’t spill anything
5. No parties
6. No boys (she’s suppppper Catholic lol)
THOUGHTS????
xo,
morgs
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To: Ali; Allison; charlotte.smith857@gmail.com; Caitlin; Ashley; Katie; Morgan L; Jen From: Nicole Date: May 8, 2014 Subject: Summertime, summertime sadness
omg this sounds amazing!!!! wowowow!
~*NICOLE
–i’m a free bitch baby–(tbt lady gaga)
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To: Ali; Allison; charlotte.smith857@gmail.com; Caitlin; Ashley; Katie; Nicole; Jen From: Nicole Date: May 8, 2014 Subject: Summertime, summertime sadness
ummm okay we cannot do this.
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To: Nicole; Allison; charlotte.smith857@gmail.com; Caitlin; Ashley; Katie; Morgan L; Jen From: Ali Date: May 9, 2014 Subject: Summertime, summertime sadness
Aw Morgan, your Aunt sounds adorbs! Here’s the thing. Obviously Nantucket is beautiful. I love their shade of pants, and I love their nectars. I’m wondering if your Aunt can be a bit flexible on her “rules.”
I mean I don’t anticipate anything crazy happening, but let’s just say that I juice cleanse my way into some crop tops, look super fierce, and somehow we all end up at a yacht party put on by one of the Patriots! Then I start hitting it off with some dude named Jack or Blake or maybe Aidan, and he wants to go somewhere quiet where he can be vulnerable and open up to me about his fears about his upcoming run for Congress. We get in his Hummer, he puts on Jack Johnson or Mahler or something to get the mood all nice, and just as he’s about to lean in I have to tell him he can’t come over to fall in love with me because of Morgan’s Aunt???
Would your Aunt really be upset? Is there a way to check if she has any nannycams and what her security system is like? Like if there’s cameras, can they be disabled, or what are we working with? No bigs! Just let me know by EOB.
xo Ali
“It’s overwhelming because I love what I do and people have believed in me for so long that I can make it to this point, to feel that.” – Pharrell to Oprah
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To: Nicole; Allison; charlotte.smith857@gmail.com; Caitlin; Ashley; Katie; Morgan L; Ali From: Jen Date: May 10, 2014 Subject: Summertime, summertime sadness
Hi Ladies!
Aw, this sounds so fun! Brad and I will be actually be summering in the family’s ancestral home in Sag Harbor. Ugh, right?? ;)
Would be fun to meet up for tea though if you girls are out East!
Warmest,
Jen
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To: Nicole; Allison; charlotte.smith857@gmail.com; Caitlin; Jen; Katie; Morgan L; Ali From: Ashley Date: May 10, 2014 Subject: Summertime, summertime sadness
Ali,
I agree with you literally 110% on all fronts and like I know you hate when I do that but like I really do and I’m not just sucking up.
Morgan, your aunt sounds kind of rigid and what she doesn’t know won’t kill her. ALI DESERVES TO FIND LOVE, MORGAN!!!!!!! it’s almost like you don’t want to see her happy. You always were SO JEALOUS of Ali ever since Peter McCarthy kissed her during rush week freshman year even though you were obsessed with him. GET OVER IT. TALK TO YOUR AUNT.
Like I’m sorry but honestly no.
Ash
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To: Nicole; Allison; charlotte.smith857@gmail.com; Caitlin; Jen; Katie; Ashley; Ali From: Morgan L Date: May 11, 2014 Subject: Summertime, summertime sadness
LOL you are hilarious Ash! That’s so funny about Peter McCarthy. I can’t believe I used to love lax bros. That seems so long ago. I wonder what happened to him? He just liked some girls bikini pic on Instagram, but then he also just liked a photo of a corgi!!! I could message him and find out what he’s doing this summer and if they are going in on a house?? Ali would you be ok seeing a former flame?? You know we went to Benihana once. Pretty ratched. But cute!!
My aunt is really strict. What about Jen and Brad’s incestral home??
<3, Morgies
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To: Nicole; Allison; charlotte.smith857@gmail.com; Caitlin; Jen; Katie; Ashley; Morgan L From: Ali Date: May 12, 2014 Subject: Summertime, summertime sadness
Hi Ladies!
Sketchy Scott just texted that there’s room in his share!!!!!!
He’ll hold it for us, but we need to let him know ASAP!!!! I AM SO EXCITED!!!!!! Can everyone paypal me $4500 today??? I’m so excited I can’t even work!!!!
<3 Ali!
“If you love me come on get involved // Feel it rushing through you from your head to toe // Oh-Oh-Oh-Ooh-Oh” – Ed Sheeran <3
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To: Nicole; Allison; charlotte.smith857@gmail.com; Caitlin; Jen; Katie; Ali; Morgan L From: Ashley Date: May 12, 2014 Subject: Summertime, summertime sadness
I THINK THAT IS AN AMAZING IDEA, ALI.
<3 Ash
PS i love ed sheeran!!!!!
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To: Nicole; Allison; charlotte.smith857@gmail.com; Caitlin; Jen; Ashley; Ali; Morgan L From: Katie Date: May 13, 2014 Subject: Summertime, summertime sadness
I think maybe I am going to sit this trip out, ladies, sorry! So much going on. Morgs I’d love to do like a weekend trip to your aunts if you’re down? Ping me :)
Katie
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To: Katie; Allison; charlotte.smith857@gmail.com; Caitlin; Jen; Ashley; Ali; Morgan L From: Nicole Date: May 13, 2014 Subject: Summertime, summertime sadness
Ali,
I just paypal’d you $4500 can you confirm that I get my own room with a view of the ocean??? It’s really important I get my own room.
Nicole
PS – will miss you katie!!!! and morgan
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To: Katie; Allison; charlotte.smith857@gmail.com; Caitlin; Nicole; Ashley; Ali; Morgan L From: Jen Date: May 13, 2014 Subject: Summertime, summertime sadness
Hey Ladies,
Can you take me off this thread?
<3 Jen
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To: Katie; Allison; charlotte.smith857@gmail.com; Caitlin; Nicole; Ashley; Ali; Jen From: Morgan Date: May 13, 2014 Subject: Summertime, summertime sadness
STOP REPLYING ALL THIS IS SUPER ANNOYING!!!!
<3 Morgs
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To: Katie; Allison; charlotte.smith857@gmail.com; Caitlin; Morgan L; Ashley; Ali; Jen From: Nicole Date: May 13, 2014 Subject: Summertime, summertime sadness
WHOA MIDOL MOMENT. Ok, I promise not to reply all anymore!
Whats everyone doing tonight??
~Nicole~
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To: Katie; Allison; charlotte.smith857@gmail.com; Caitlin; Morgan L; Nicole; Ali; Jen From: Ashley Date: May 13, 2014 Subject: Summertime, summertime sadness
LOL did jen actually ask to be taken off the thread??? LIKE OKAY have fun being married and lame.
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To: Ashley; Allison; charlotte.smith857@gmail.com; Caitlin; Morgan L; Nicole; Ali; Jen From: Katie Date: May 16, 2014 Subject: Summertime, summertime sadness
ASH
Ladies do you think this is our last summer as single women??? like what if we’re all getting married next summer?? (Also, if that’s the case, you’ll all remember my dream is to have a September wedding so lol, I call the month of Sept!!)
- Katie
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To: Ashley; Allison; charlotte.smith857@gmail.com; Caitlin; Morgan L; Nicole; Katie; Jen From: Ali Date: May 19, 2014 Subject: Summertime, summertime sadness
Hi Ladies!
Wow, Katie. I didn’t hear back from you in time, and already confirmed the summer share in the Hamps. If you REALLY can’t make it, please just paypal me $4500 for your share then. Otherwise, the price goes up for everyone and that’s just not fair.
It will be really fun! We’ll all be sharing a room (LOL Nicole, we’re all on a budget girl!), and the guys in the house seem pretty dope and chill. Should we happy hour beforehand to all meet?? I call dibs on Blackout Brad and Kevin the Crusher as my summer fling, but I think there are lots of cool bros in the house too!
Also everyone PLEASE paypal me the $4500 by today!!! I need it to pay rent!!! I put 25k on my credit card (HELLO miles!) and am freaking out!
Loveeeee,
Ali
“I built you, so stop playing games” – Apollo, Real Housewives
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To: Ashley; Allison; charlotte.smith857@gmail.com; Caitlin; Morgan L; Nicole; Ali; Jen; Nicole From: Katie Date: May 19, 2014 Subject: Summertime, summertime sadness
Ali,
Call me.
Katie.
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To: Ashley; Allison; charlotte.smith857@gmail.com; Caitlin; Morgan L; Katie; Ali; Jen; Nicole From: Nicole Date: May 19, 2014 Subject: Summertime, summertime sadness
OMG Katie, yes this is probs our last summer as single girls, cause we’ll probs meet our husbands at Surf Lodge or Sloppy Tuna!!! YOU HAVE TO COME DO ITTT SAY YES
-Nic
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To: Ashley; Allison; charlotte.smith857@gmail.com; Caitlin; Morgan L; Katie; Nicole; Jen; Nicole From: Ali Date: May 19, 2014 Subject: Summertime, summertime sadness
Anything you want to say to me, you can say in front of everyone.
<3 Ali
“You know the sting of losing, or not getting something you badly want. When that happens, show what you are made of.” – Jill Abramson <3
And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.
— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15
Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.
— John Locke, “Second Treatise”
By our unpaid labor and suffering, we have earned the right to the soil, many times over and over, and now we are determined to have it.
— Anonymous, 1861
I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
Clyde Ross was born in 1923, the seventh of 13 children, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues. Ross’s parents owned and farmed a 40-acre tract of land, flush with cows, hogs, and mules. Ross’s mother would drive to Clarksdale to do her shopping in a horse and buggy, in which she invested all the pride one might place in a Cadillac. The family owned another horse, with a red coat, which they gave to Clyde. The Ross family wanted for little, save that which all black families in the Deep South then desperately desired—the protection of the law.
Clyde Ross, photographed in November 2013 in his home in the North Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago, where he has lived for more than 50 years. When he first tried to get a legitimate mortgage, he was denied; mortgages were effectively not available to black people. (Carlos Javier Ortiz)
In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. The majority of the people in the state were perpetually robbed of the vote—a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state. “You and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting,” blustered Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator and a proud Klansman. “You do it the night before the election.”
The state’s regime partnered robbery of the franchise with robbery of the purse. Many of Mississippi’s black farmers lived in debt peonage, under the sway of cotton kings who were at once their landlords, their employers, and their primary merchants. Tools and necessities were advanced against the return on the crop, which was determined by the employer. When farmers were deemed to be in debt—and they often were—the negative balance was then carried over to the next season. A man or woman who protested this arrangement did so at the risk of grave injury or death. Refusing to work meant arrest under vagrancy laws and forced labor under the state’s penal system.
Well into the 20th century, black people spoke of their flight from Mississippi in much the same manner as their runagate ancestors had. In her 2010 book, The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of Eddie Earvin, a spinach picker who fled Mississippi in 1963, after being made to work at gunpoint. “You didn’t talk about it or tell nobody,” Earvin said. “You had to sneak away.”
When Clyde Ross was still a child, Mississippi authorities claimed his father owed $3,000 in back taxes. The elder Ross could not read. He did not have a lawyer. He did not know anyone at the local courthouse. He could not expect the police to be impartial. Effectively, the Ross family had no way to contest the claim and no protection under the law. The authorities seized the land. They seized the buggy. They took the cows, hogs, and mules. And so for the upkeep of separate but equal, the entire Ross family was reduced to sharecropping.
This was hardly unusual. In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land valued at tens of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism. “Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia,” the AP reported, as well as “oil fields in Mississippi” and “a baseball spring training facility in Florida.”
Clyde Ross was a smart child. His teacher thought he should attend a more challenging school. There was very little support for educating black people in Mississippi. But Julius Rosenwald, a part owner of Sears, Roebuck, had begun an ambitious effort to build schools for black children throughout the South. Ross’s teacher believed he should attend the local Rosenwald school. It was too far for Ross to walk and get back in time to work in the fields. Local white children had a school bus. Clyde Ross did not, and thus lost the chance to better his education.
Then, when Ross was 10 years old, a group of white men demanded his only childhood possession—the horse with the red coat. “You can’t have this horse. We want it,” one of the white men said. They gave Ross’s father $17.
“I did everything for that horse,” Ross told me. “Everything. And they took him. Put him on the racetrack. I never did know what happened to him after that, but I know they didn’t bring him back. So that’s just one of my losses.”
Sharecropper boys in 1936 (Carly Mydans/Library of Congress)
The losses mounted. As sharecroppers, the Ross family saw their wages treated as the landlord’s slush fund. Landowners were supposed to split the profits from the cotton fields with sharecroppers. But bales would often disappear during the count, or the split might be altered on a whim. If cotton was selling for 50 cents a pound, the Ross family might get 15 cents, or only five. One year Ross’s mother promised to buy him a $7 suit for a summer program at their church. She ordered the suit by mail. But that year Ross’s family was paid only five cents a pound for cotton. The mailman arrived with the suit. The Rosses could not pay. The suit was sent back. Clyde Ross did not go to the church program.
It was in these early years that Ross began to understand himself as an American—he did not live under the blind decree of justice, but under the heel of a regime that elevated armed robbery to a governing principle. He thought about fighting. “Just be quiet,” his father told him. “Because they’ll come and kill us all.”
Clyde Ross grew. He was drafted into the Army. The draft officials offered him an exemption if he stayed home and worked. He preferred to take his chances with war. He was stationed in California. He found that he could go into stores without being bothered. He could walk the streets without being harassed. He could go into a restaurant and receive service.
Ross was shipped off to Guam. He fought in World War II to save the world from tyranny. But when he returned to Clarksdale, he found that tyranny had followed him home. This was 1947, eight years before Mississippi lynched Emmett Till and tossed his broken body into the Tallahatchie River. The Great Migration, a mass exodus of 6 million African Americans that spanned most of the 20th century, was now in its second wave. The black pilgrims did not journey north simply seeking better wages and work, or bright lights and big adventures. They were fleeing the acquisitive warlords of the South. They were seeking the protection of the law.
Clyde Ross was among them. He came to Chicago in 1947 and took a job as a taster at Campbell’s Soup. He made a stable wage. He married. He had children. His paycheck was his own. No Klansmen stripped him of the vote. When he walked down the street, he did not have to move because a white man was walking past. He did not have to take off his hat or avert his gaze. His journey from peonage to full citizenship seemed near-complete. Only one item was missing—a home, that final badge of entry into the sacred order of the American middle class of the Eisenhower years.
In 1961, Ross and his wife bought a house in North Lawndale, a bustling community on Chicago’s West Side. North Lawndale had long been a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, but a handful of middle-class African Americans had lived there starting in the ’40s. The community was anchored by the sprawling Sears, Roebuck headquarters. North Lawndale’s Jewish People’s Institute actively encouraged blacks to move into the neighborhood, seeking to make it a “pilot community for interracial living.” In the battle for integration then being fought around the country, North Lawndale seemed to offer promising terrain. But out in the tall grass, highwaymen, nefarious as any Clarksdale kleptocrat, were lying in wait.
Three months after Clyde Ross moved into his house, the boiler blew out. This would normally be a homeowner’s responsibility, but in fact, Ross was not really a homeowner. His payments were made to the seller, not the bank. And Ross had not signed a normal mortgage. He’d bought “on contract”: a predatory agreement that combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting—while offering the benefits of neither. Ross had bought his house for $27,500. The seller, not the previous homeowner but a new kind of middleman, had bought it for only $12,000 six months before selling it to Ross. In a contract sale, the seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full—and, unlike with a normal mortgage, Ross would acquire no equity in the meantime. If he missed a single payment, he would immediately forfeit his $1,000 down payment, all his monthly payments, and the property itself.
The men who peddled contracts in North Lawndale would sell homes at inflated prices and then evict families who could not pay—taking their down payment and their monthly installments as profit. Then they’d bring in another black family, rinse, and repeat. “He loads them up with payments they can’t meet,” an office secretary told The Chicago Daily News of her boss, the speculator Lou Fushanis, in 1963. “Then he takes the property away from them. He’s sold some of the buildings three or four times.”
Ross had tried to get a legitimate mortgage in another neighborhood, but was told by a loan officer that there was no financing available. The truth was that there was no financing for people like Clyde Ross. From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from “restrictive covenants” to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated.
Their efforts were buttressed by the federal government. In 1934, Congress created the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA insured private mortgages, causing a drop in interest rates and a decline in the size of the down payment required to buy a house. But an insured mortgage was not a possibility for Clyde Ross. The FHA had adopted a system of maps that rated neighborhoods according to their perceived stability. On the maps, green areas, rated “A,” indicated “in demand” neighborhoods that, as one appraiser put it, lacked “a single foreigner or Negro.” These neighborhoods were considered excellent prospects for insurance. Neighborhoods where black people lived were rated “D” and were usually considered ineligible for FHA backing. They were colored in red. Neither the percentage of black people living there nor their social class mattered. Black people were viewed as a contagion. Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage.
Explore Redlining in Chicago
A 1939 Home Owners’ Loan Corporation “Residential Security Map” of Chicago shows discrimination against low-income and minority neighborhoods. The residents of the areas marked in red (representing “hazardous” real-estate markets) were denied FHA-backed mortgages. (Map development by Frankie Dintino)
“A government offering such bounty to builders and lenders could have required compliance with a nondiscrimination policy,” Charles Abrams, the urban-studies expert who helped create the New York City Housing Authority, wrote in 1955. “Instead, the FHA adopted a racial policy that could well have been culled from the Nuremberg laws.”
The devastating effects are cogently outlined by Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro in their 1995 book, Black Wealth/White Wealth:
Locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history, African Americans who desired and were able to afford home ownership found themselves consigned to central-city communities where their investments were affected by the “self-fulfilling prophecies” of the FHA appraisers: cut off from sources of new investment[,] their homes and communities deteriorated and lost value in comparison to those homes and communities that FHA appraisers deemed desirable.
In Chicago and across the country, whites looking to achieve the American dream could rely on a legitimate credit system backed by the government. Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport. “It was like people who like to go out and shoot lions in Africa. It was the same thrill,” a housing attorney told the historian Beryl Satter in her 2009 book, Family Properties. “The thrill of the chase and the kill.”
The kill was profitable. At the time of his death, Lou Fushanis owned more than 600 properties, many of them in North Lawndale, and his estate was estimated to be worth $3 million. He’d made much of this money by exploiting the frustrated hopes of black migrants like Clyde Ross. During this period, according to one estimate, 85 percent of all black home buyers who bought in Chicago bought on contract. “If anybody who is well established in this business in Chicago doesn’t earn $100,000 a year,” a contract seller told The Saturday Evening Post in 1962, “he is loafing.”
Contract sellers became rich. North Lawndale became a ghetto.
Clyde Ross still lives there. He still owns his home. He is 91, and the emblems of survival are all around him—awards for service in his community, pictures of his children in cap and gown. But when I asked him about his home in North Lawndale, I heard only anarchy.
“We were ashamed. We did not want anyone to know that we were that ignorant,” Ross told me. He was sitting at his dining-room table. His glasses were as thick as his Clarksdale drawl. “I’d come out of Mississippi where there was one mess, and come up here and got in another mess. So how dumb am I? I didn’t want anyone to know how dumb I was.
“When I found myself caught up in it, I said, ‘How? I just left this mess. I just left no laws. And no regard. And then I come here and get cheated wide open.’ I would probably want to do some harm to some people, you know, if I had been violent like some of us. I thought, ‘Man, I got caught up in this stuff. I can’t even take care of my kids.’ I didn’t have enough for my kids. You could fall through the cracks easy fighting these white people. And no law.”
But fight Clyde Ross did. In 1968 he joined the newly formed Contract Buyers League—a collection of black homeowners on Chicago’s South and West Sides, all of whom had been locked into the same system of predation. There was Howell Collins, whose contract called for him to pay $25,500 for a house that a speculator had bought for $14,500. There was Ruth Wells, who’d managed to pay out half her contract, expecting a mortgage, only to suddenly see an insurance bill materialize out of thin air—a requirement the seller had added without Wells’s knowledge. Contract sellers used every tool at their disposal to pilfer from their clients. They scared white residents into selling low. They lied about properties’ compliance with building codes, then left the buyer responsible when city inspectors arrived. They presented themselves as real-estate brokers, when in fact they were the owners. They guided their clients to lawyers who were in on the scheme.
The Contract Buyers League fought back. Members—who would eventually number more than 500—went out to the posh suburbs where the speculators lived and embarrassed them by knocking on their neighbors’ doors and informing them of the details of the contract-lending trade. They refused to pay their installments, instead holding monthly payments in an escrow account. Then they brought a suit against the contract sellers, accusing them of buying properties and reselling in such a manner “to reap from members of the Negro race large and unjust profits.”
The story of Clyde Ross and the Contract Buyers League
In return for the “deprivations of their rights and privileges under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments,” the league demanded “prayers for relief”—payback of all moneys paid on contracts and all moneys paid for structural improvement of properties, at 6 percent interest minus a “fair, non-discriminatory” rental price for time of occupation. Moreover, the league asked the court to adjudge that the defendants had “acted willfully and maliciously and that malice is the gist of this action.”
Ross and the Contract Buyers League were no longer appealing to the government simply for equality. They were no longer fleeing in hopes of a better deal elsewhere. They were charging society with a crime against their community. They wanted the crime publicly ruled as such. They wanted the crime’s executors declared to be offensive to society. And they wanted restitution for the great injury brought upon them by said offenders. In 1968, Clyde Ross and the Contract Buyers League were no longer simply seeking the protection of the law. They were seeking reparations.
II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
According to the most-recent statistics, North Lawndale is now on the wrong end of virtually every socioeconomic indicator. In 1930 its population was 112,000. Today it is 36,000. The halcyon talk of “interracial living” is dead. The neighborhood is 92 percent black. Its homicide rate is 45 per 100,000—triple the rate of the city as a whole. The infant-mortality rate is 14 per 1,000—more than twice the national average. Forty-three percent of the people in North Lawndale live below the poverty line—double Chicago’s overall rate. Forty-five percent of all households are on food stamps—nearly three times the rate of the city at large. Sears, Roebuck left the neighborhood in 1987, taking 1,800 jobs with it. Kids in North Lawndale need not be confused about their prospects: Cook County’s Juvenile Temporary Detention Center sits directly adjacent to the neighborhood.
North Lawndale is an extreme portrait of the trends that ail black Chicago. Such is the magnitude of these ailments that it can be said that blacks and whites do not inhabit the same city. The average per capita income of Chicago’s white neighborhoods is almost three times that of its black neighborhoods. When the Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson examined incarceration rates in Chicago in his 2012 book, Great American City, he found that a black neighborhood with one of the highest incarceration rates (West Garfield Park) had a rate more than 40 times as high as the white neighborhood with the highest rate (Clearing). “This is a staggering differential, even for community-level comparisons,” Sampson writes. “A difference of kind, not degree.”
Interactive Census Map
Explore race, unemployment, and vacancy rates over seven decades in Chicago. (Map design and development by Frankie Dintino)
In other words, Chicago’s impoverished black neighborhoods—characterized by high unemployment and households headed by single parents—are not simply poor; they are “ecologically distinct.” This “is not simply the same thing as low economic status,” writes Sampson. “In this pattern Chicago is not alone.”
The lives of black Americans are better than they were half a century ago. The humiliation of Whites Only signs are gone. Rates of black poverty have decreased. Black teen-pregnancy rates are at record lows—and the gap between black and white teen-pregnancy rates has shrunk significantly. But such progress rests on a shaky foundation, and fault lines are everywhere. The income gap between black and white households is roughly the same today as it was in 1970. Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University, studied children born from 1955 through 1970 and found that 4 percent of whites and 62 percent of blacks across America had been raised in poor neighborhoods. A generation later, the same study showed, virtually nothing had changed. And whereas whites born into affluent neighborhoods tended to remain in affluent neighborhoods, blacks tended to fall out of them.
This is not surprising. Black families, regardless of income, are significantly less wealthy than white families. The Pew Research Center estimates that white households are worth roughly 20 times as much as black households, and that whereas only 15 percent of whites have zero or negative wealth, more than a third of blacks do. Effectively, the black family in America is working without a safety net. When financial calamity strikes—a medical emergency, divorce, job loss—the fall is precipitous.
And just as black families of all incomes remain handicapped by a lack of wealth, so too do they remain handicapped by their restricted choice of neighborhood. Black people with upper-middle-class incomes do not generally live in upper-middle-class neighborhoods. Sharkey’s research shows that black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000. “Blacks and whites inhabit such different neighborhoods,” Sharkey writes, “that it is not possible to compare the economic outcomes of black and white children.”
A national real-estate association advised not to sell to “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education.”
The implications are chilling. As a rule, poor black people do not work their way out of the ghetto—and those who do often face the horror of watching their children and grandchildren tumble back.
Even seeming evidence of progress withers under harsh light. In 2012, the Manhattan Institute cheerily noted that segregation had declined since the 1960s. And yet African Americans still remained—by far—the most segregated ethnic group in the country.
With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin. The resulting conflagration has been devastating.
One thread of thinking in the African American community holds that these depressing numbers partially stem from cultural pathologies that can be altered through individual grit and exceptionally good behavior. (In 2011, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, responding to violence among young black males, put the blame on the family: “Too many men making too many babies they don’t want to take care of, and then we end up dealing with your children.” Nutter turned to those presumably fatherless babies: “Pull your pants up and buy a belt, because no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt.”) The thread is as old as black politics itself. It is also wrong. The kind of trenchant racism to which black people have persistently been subjected can never be defeated by making its victims more respectable. The essence of American racism is disrespect. And in the wake of the grim numbers, we see the grim inheritance.
The Contract Buyers League’s suit brought by Clyde Ross and his allies took direct aim at this inheritance. The suit was rooted in Chicago’s long history of segregation, which had created two housing markets—one legitimate and backed by the government, the other lawless and patrolled by predators. The suit dragged on until 1976, when the league lost a jury trial. Securing the equal protection of the law proved hard; securing reparations proved impossible. If there were any doubts about the mood of the jury, the foreman removed them by saying, when asked about the verdict, that he hoped it would help end “the mess Earl Warren made with Brown v. Board of Education and all that nonsense.”
The Supreme Court seems to share that sentiment. The past two decades have witnessed a rollback of the progressive legislation of the 1960s. Liberals have found themselves on the defensive. In 2008, when Barack Obama was a candidate for president, he was asked whether his daughters—Malia and Sasha—should benefit from affirmative action. He answered in the negative.
The exchange rested upon an erroneous comparison of the average American white family and the exceptional first family. In the contest of upward mobility, Barack and Michelle Obama have won. But they’ve won by being twice as good—and enduring twice as much. Malia and Sasha Obama enjoy privileges beyond the average white child’s dreams. But that comparison is incomplete. The more telling question is how they compare with Jenna and Barbara Bush—the products of many generations of privilege, not just one. Whatever the Obama children achieve, it will be evidence of their family’s singular perseverance, not of broad equality.
III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
In 1783, the freedwoman Belinda Royall petitioned the commonwealth of Massachusetts for reparations. Belinda had been born in modern-day Ghana. She was kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery. She endured the Middle Passage and 50 years of enslavement at the hands of Isaac Royall and his son. But the junior Royall, a British loyalist, fled the country during the Revolution. Belinda, now free after half a century of labor, beseeched the nascent Massachusetts legislature:
The face of your Petitioner, is now marked with the furrows of time, and her frame bending under the oppression of years, while she, by the Laws of the Land, is denied the employment of one morsel of that immense wealth, apart whereof hath been accumilated by her own industry, and the whole augmented by her servitude.
WHEREFORE, casting herself at your feet if your honours, as to a body of men, formed for the extirpation of vassalage, for the reward of Virtue, and the just return of honest industry—she prays, that such allowance may be made her out of the Estate of Colonel Royall, as will prevent her, and her more infirm daughter, from misery in the greatest extreme, and scatter comfort over the short and downward path of their lives.
Belinda Royall was granted a pension of 15 pounds and 12 shillings, to be paid out of the estate of Isaac Royall—one of the earliest successful attempts to petition for reparations. At the time, black people in America had endured more than 150 years of enslavement, and the idea that they might be owed something in return was, if not the national consensus, at least not outrageous.
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“A heavy account lies against us as a civil society for oppressions committed against people who did not injure us,” wrote the Quaker John Woolman in 1769, “and that if the particular case of many individuals were fairly stated, it would appear that there was considerable due to them.”
As the historian Roy E. Finkenbine has documented, at the dawn of this country, black reparations were actively considered and often effected. Quakers in New York, New England, and Baltimore went so far as to make “membership contingent upon compensating one’s former slaves.” In 1782, the Quaker Robert Pleasants emancipated his 78 slaves, granted them 350 acres, and later built a school on their property and provided for their education. “The doing of this justice to the injured Africans,” wrote Pleasants, “would be an acceptable offering to him who ‘Rules in the kingdom of men.’ ”
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Edward Coles, a protégé of Thomas Jefferson who became a slaveholder through inheritance, took many of his slaves north and granted them a plot of land in Illinois. John Randolph, a cousin of Jefferson’s, willed that all his slaves be emancipated upon his death, and that all those older than 40 be given 10 acres of land. “I give and bequeath to all my slaves their freedom,” Randolph wrote, “heartily regretting that I have been the owner of one.”
In his book Forever Free, Eric Foner recounts the story of a disgruntled planter reprimanding a freedman loafing on the job:
Planter: “You lazy nigger, I am losing a whole day’s labor by you.”
Freedman: “Massa, how many days’ labor have I lost by you?”
In the 20th century, the cause of reparations was taken up by a diverse cast that included the Confederate veteran Walter R. Vaughan, who believed that reparations would be a stimulus for the South; the black activist Callie House; black-nationalist leaders like “Queen Mother” Audley Moore; and the civil-rights activist James Forman. The movement coalesced in 1987 under an umbrella organization called the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA). The NAACP endorsed reparations in 1993. Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a professor at Harvard Law School, has pursued reparations claims in court.
But while the people advocating reparations have changed over time, the response from the country has remained virtually the same. “They have been taught to labor,” the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1891. “They have been taught Christian civilization, and to speak the noble English language instead of some African gibberish. The account is square with the ex‑slaves.”
Not exactly. Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the Deep South, a second slavery ruled. In the North, legislatures, mayors, civic associations, banks, and citizens all colluded to pin black people into ghettos, where they were overcrowded, overcharged, and undereducated. Businesses discriminated against them, awarding them the worst jobs and the worst wages. Police brutalized them in the streets. And the notion that black lives, black bodies, and black wealth were rightful targets remained deeply rooted in the broader society. Now we have half-stepped away from our long centuries of despoilment, promising, “Never again.” But still we are haunted. It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us.
Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay? But if the practicalities, not the justice, of reparations are the true sticking point, there has for some time been the beginnings of a solution. For the past 25 years, Congressman John Conyers Jr., who represents the Detroit area, has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for “appropriate remedies.”
A country curious about how reparations might actually work has an easy solution in Conyers’s bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. We would support this bill, submit the question to study, and then assess the possible solutions. But we are not interested.
“It’s because it’s black folks making the claim,” Nkechi Taifa, who helped found N’COBRA, says. “People who talk about reparations are considered left lunatics. But all we are talking about is studying [reparations]. As John Conyers has said, we study everything. We study the water, the air. We can’t even study the issue? This bill does not authorize one red cent to anyone.”
That HR 40 has never—under either Democrats or Republicans—made it to the House floor suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential. If we conclude that the conditions in North Lawndale and black America are not inexplicable but are instead precisely what you’d expect of a community that for centuries has lived in America’s crosshairs, then what are we to make of the world’s oldest democracy?
One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing the acts of one’s ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration. The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte. A nation outlives its generations. We were not there when Washington crossed the Delaware, but Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s rendering has meaning to us. We were not there when Woodrow Wilson took us into World War I, but we are still paying out the pensions. If Thomas Jefferson’s genius matters, then so does his taking of Sally Hemings’s body. If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.
Black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000.
In 1909, President William Howard Taft told the country that “intelligent” white southerners were ready to see blacks as “useful members of the community.” A week later Joseph Gordon, a black man, was lynched outside Greenwood, Mississippi. The high point of the lynching era has passed. But the memories of those robbed of their lives still live on in the lingering effects. Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don’t look.
There has always been another way. “It is in vain to alledge, that our ancestors brought them hither, and not we,” Yale President Timothy Dwight said in 1810.
We inherit our ample patrimony with all its incumbrances; and are bound to pay the debts of our ancestors. This debt, particularly, we are bound to discharge: and, when the righteous Judge of the Universe comes to reckon with his servants, he will rigidly exact the payment at our hands. To give them liberty, and stop here, is to entail upon them a curse.
IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
America begins in black plunder and white democracy, two features that are not contradictory but complementary. “The men who came together to found the independent United States, dedicated to freedom and equality, either held slaves or were willing to join hands with those who did,” the historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote. “None of them felt entirely comfortable about the fact, but neither did they feel responsible for it. Most of them had inherited both their slaves and their attachment to freedom from an earlier generation, and they knew the two were not unconnected.”
Slaves in South Carolina prepare cotton for the gin in 1862. (Timothy H. O’sullivan/Library of Congress)
When enslaved Africans, plundered of their bodies, plundered of their families, and plundered of their labor, were brought to the colony of Virginia in 1619, they did not initially endure the naked racism that would engulf their progeny. Some of them were freed. Some of them intermarried. Still others escaped with the white indentured servants who had suffered as they had. Some even rebelled together, allying under Nathaniel Bacon to torch Jamestown in 1676.
One hundred years later, the idea of slaves and poor whites joining forces would shock the senses, but in the early days of the English colonies, the two groups had much in common. English visitors to Virginia found that its masters “abuse their servantes with intollerable oppression and hard usage.” White servants were flogged, tricked into serving beyond their contracts, and traded in much the same manner as slaves.
This “hard usage” originated in a simple fact of the New World—land was boundless but cheap labor was limited. As life spans increased in the colony, the Virginia planters found in the enslaved Africans an even more efficient source of cheap labor. Whereas indentured servants were still legal subjects of the English crown and thus entitled to certain protections, African slaves entered the colonies as aliens. Exempted from the protections of the crown, they became early America’s indispensable working class—fit for maximum exploitation, capable of only minimal resistance.
For the next 250 years, American law worked to reduce black people to a class of untouchables and raise all white men to the level of citizens. In 1650, Virginia mandated that “all persons except Negroes” were to carry arms. In 1664, Maryland mandated that any Englishwoman who married a slave must live as a slave of her husband’s master. In 1705, the Virginia assembly passed a law allowing for the dismemberment of unruly slaves—but forbidding masters from whipping “a Christian white servant naked, without an order from a justice of the peace.” In that same law, the colony mandated that “all horses, cattle, and hogs, now belonging, or that hereafter shall belong to any slave” be seized and sold off by the local church, the profits used to support “the poor of the said parish.” At that time, there would have still been people alive who could remember blacks and whites joining to burn down Jamestown only 29 years before. But at the beginning of the 18th century, two primary classes were enshrined in America.
“The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” John C. Calhoun, South Carolina’s senior senator, declared on the Senate floor in 1848. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.”
In 1860, the majority of people living in South Carolina and Mississippi, almost half of those living in Georgia, and about one-third of all Southerners were on the wrong side of Calhoun’s line. The state with the largest number of enslaved Americans was Virginia, where in certain counties some 70 percent of all people labored in chains. Nearly one-fourth of all white Southerners owned slaves, and upon their backs the economic basis of America—and much of the Atlantic world—was erected. In the seven cotton states, one-third of all white income was derived from slavery. By 1840, cotton produced by slave labor constituted 59 percent of the country’s exports. The web of this slave society extended north to the looms of New England, and across the Atlantic to Great Britain, where it powered a great economic transformation and altered the trajectory of world history. “Whoever says Industrial Revolution,” wrote the historian Eric J. Hobsbawm, “says cotton.”
In this artistic rendering by Henry Louis Stephens, a well-known illustrator of the era, a family is in the process of being separated at a slave auction. (Library of Congress)
The wealth accorded America by slavery was not just in what the slaves pulled from the land but in the slaves themselves. “In 1860, slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together,” the Yale historian David W. Blight has noted. “Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy.” The sale of these slaves—“in whose bodies that money congealed,” writes Walter Johnson, a Harvard historian—generated even more ancillary wealth. Loans were taken out for purchase, to be repaid with interest. Insurance policies were drafted against the untimely death of a slave and the loss of potential profits. Slave sales were taxed and notarized. The vending of the black body and the sundering of the black family became an economy unto themselves, estimated to have brought in tens of millions of dollars to antebellum America. In 1860 there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the country.
Beneath the cold numbers lay lives divided. “I had a constant dread that Mrs. Moore, her mistress, would be in want of money and sell my dear wife,” a freedman wrote, reflecting on his time in slavery. “We constantly dreaded a final separation. Our affection for each was very strong, and this made us always apprehensive of a cruel parting.”
Forced partings were common in the antebellum South. A slave in some parts of the region stood a 30 percent chance of being sold in his or her lifetime. Twenty-five percent of interstate trades destroyed a first marriage and half of them destroyed a nuclear family.
When the wife and children of Henry Brown, a slave in Richmond, Virginia, were to be sold away, Brown searched for a white master who might buy his wife and children to keep the family together. He failed:
The next day, I stationed myself by the side of the road, along which the slaves, amounting to three hundred and fifty, were to pass. The purchaser of my wife was a Methodist minister, who was about starting for North Carolina. Pretty soon five waggon-loads of little children passed, and looking at the foremost one, what should I see but a little child, pointing its tiny hand towards me, exclaiming, “There’s my father; I knew he would come and bid me good-bye.” It was my eldest child! Soon the gang approached in which my wife was chained. I looked, and beheld her familiar face; but O, reader, that glance of agony! may God spare me ever again enduring the excruciating horror of that moment! She passed, and came near to where I stood. I seized hold of her hand, intending to bid her farewell; but words failed me; the gift of utterance had fled, and I remained speechless. I followed her for some distance, with her hand grasped in mine, as if to save her from her fate, but I could not speak, and I was obliged to turn away in silence.
In a time when telecommunications were primitive and blacks lacked freedom of movement, the parting of black families was a kind of murder. Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy—in the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family. The destruction was not incidental to America’s rise; it facilitated that rise. By erecting a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy. The labor strife that seeded Bacon’s rebellion was suppressed. America’s indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values. Assessing antebellum democracy in Virginia, a visitor from England observed that the state’s natives “can profess an unbounded love of liberty and of democracy in consequence of the mass of the people, who in other countries might become mobs, being there nearly altogether composed of their own Negro slaves.”
V. The Quiet Plunder
The consequences of 250 years of enslavement, of war upon black families and black people, were profound. Like homeownership today, slave ownership was aspirational, attracting not just those who owned slaves but those who wished to. Much as homeowners today might discuss the addition of a patio or the painting of a living room, slaveholders traded tips on the best methods for breeding workers, exacting labor, and doling out punishment. Just as a homeowner today might subscribe to a magazine like This Old House, slaveholders had journals such as De Bow’s Review, which recommended the best practices for wringing profits from slaves. By the dawn of the Civil War, the enslavement of black America was thought to be so foundational to the country that those who sought to end it were branded heretics worthy of death. Imagine what would happen if a president today came out in favor of taking all American homes from their owners: the reaction might well be violent.
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“This country was formed for the white, not for the black man,” John Wilkes Booth wrote, before killing Abraham Lincoln. “And looking upon African slavery from the same standpoint held by those noble framers of our Constitution, I for one have ever considered it one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us) that God ever bestowed upon a favored nation.”
In the aftermath of the Civil War, Radical Republicans attempted to reconstruct the country upon something resembling universal equality—but they were beaten back by a campaign of “Redemption,” led by White Liners, Red Shirts, and Klansmen bent on upholding a society “formed for the white, not for the black man.” A wave of terrorism roiled the South. In his massive history Reconstruction, Eric Foner recounts incidents of black people being attacked for not removing their hats; for refusing to hand over a whiskey flask; for disobeying church procedures; for “using insolent language”; for disputing labor contracts; for refusing to be “tied like a slave.” Sometimes the attacks were intended simply to “thin out the niggers a little.”
Terrorism carried the day. Federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877. The dream of Reconstruction died. For the next century, political violence was visited upon blacks wantonly, with special treatment meted out toward black people of ambition. Black schools and churches were burned to the ground. Black voters and the political candidates who attempted to rally them were intimidated, and some were murdered. At the end of World War I, black veterans returning to their homes were assaulted for daring to wear the American uniform. The demobilization of soldiers after the war, which put white and black veterans into competition for scarce jobs, produced the Red Summer of 1919: a succession of racist pogroms against dozens of cities ranging from Longview, Texas, to Chicago to Washington, D.C. Organized white violence against blacks continued into the 1920s—in 1921 a white mob leveled Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street,” and in 1923 another one razed the black town of Rosewood, Florida—and virtually no one was punished.
A postcard dated August 3, 1920, depicts the aftermath of a lynching in Center, Texas, near the Louisiana border. According to the text on the other side, the victim was a 16-year-old boy.
The work of mobs was a rabid and violent rendition of prejudices that extended even into the upper reaches of American government. The New Deal is today remembered as a model for what progressive government should do—cast a broad social safety net that protects the poor and the afflicted while building the middle class. When progressives wish to express their disappointment with Barack Obama, they point to the accomplishments of Franklin Roosevelt. But these progressives rarely note that Roosevelt’s New Deal, much like the democracy that produced it, rested on the foundation of Jim Crow.
“The Jim Crow South,” writes Ira Katznelson, a history and political-science professor at Columbia, “was the one collaborator America’s democracy could not do without.” The marks of that collaboration are all over the New Deal. The omnibus programs passed under the Social Security Act in 1935 were crafted in such a way as to protect the southern way of life. Old-age insurance (Social Security proper) and unemployment insurance excluded farmworkers and domestics—jobs heavily occupied by blacks. When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible. The NAACP protested, calling the new American safety net “a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.”
The oft-celebrated G.I. Bill similarly failed black Americans, by mirroring the broader country’s insistence on a racist housing policy. Though ostensibly color-blind, Title III of the bill, which aimed to give veterans access to low-interest home loans, left black veterans to tangle with white officials at their local Veterans Administration as well as with the same banks that had, for years, refused to grant mortgages to blacks. The historian Kathleen J. Frydl observes in her 2009 book, The GI Bill, that so many blacks were disqualified from receiving Title III benefits “that it is more accurate simply to say that blacks could not use this particular title.”
In Cold War America, homeownership was seen as a means of instilling patriotism, and as a civilizing and anti-radical force. “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist,” claimed William Levitt, who pioneered the modern suburb with the development of the various Levittowns, his famous planned communities. “He has too much to do.”
But the Levittowns were, with Levitt’s willing acquiescence, segregated throughout their early years. Daisy and Bill Myers, the first black family to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, were greeted with protests and a burning cross. A neighbor who opposed the family said that Bill Myers was “probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him I see $2,000 drop off the value of my house.”
The neighbor had good reason to be afraid. Bill and Daisy Myers were from the other side of John C. Calhoun’s dual society. If they moved next door, housing policy almost guaranteed that their neighbors’ property values would decline.
In August 1957, state police pull teenagers out of a car during a demonstration against Bill and Daisy Myers, the first African Americans to move into Levittown, Pennsyvlania. (AP Photo/Bill Ingraham)
Whereas shortly before the New Deal, a typical mortgage required a large down payment and full repayment within about 10 years, the creation of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in 1933 and then the Federal Housing Administration the following year allowed banks to offer loans requiring no more than 10 percent down, amortized over 20 to 30 years. “Without federal intervention in the housing market, massive suburbanization would have been impossible,” writes Thomas J. Sugrue, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania. “In 1930, only 30 percent of Americans owned their own homes; by 1960, more than 60 percent were home owners. Home ownership became an emblem of American citizenship.”
That emblem was not to be awarded to blacks. The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics warned that “a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood … any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values.” A 1943 brochure specified that such potential undesirables might include madams, bootleggers, gangsters—and “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.”
The federal government concurred. It was the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, not a private trade association, that pioneered the practice of redlining, selectively granting loans and insisting that any property it insured be covered by a restrictive covenant—a clause in the deed forbidding the sale of the property to anyone other than whites. Millions of dollars flowed from tax coffers into segregated white neighborhoods.
“For perhaps the first time, the federal government embraced the discriminatory attitudes of the marketplace,” the historian Kenneth T. Jackson wrote in his 1985 book, Crabgrass Frontier, a history of suburbanization. “Previously, prejudices were personalized and individualized; FHA exhorted segregation and enshrined it as public policy. Whole areas of cities were declared ineligible for loan guarantees.” Redlining was not officially outlawed until 1968, by the Fair Housing Act. By then the damage was done—and reports of redlining by banks have continued.
The federal government is premised on equal fealty from all its citizens, who in return are to receive equal treatment. But as late as the mid-20th century, this bargain was not granted to black people, who repeatedly paid a higher price for citizenship and received less in return. Plunder had been the essential feature of slavery, of the society described by Calhoun. But practically a full century after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the plunder—quiet, systemic, submerged—continued even amidst the aims and achievements of New Deal liberals.
VI. Making The Second Ghetto
Today Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the country, a fact that reflects assiduous planning. In the effort to uphold white supremacy at every level down to the neighborhood, Chicago—a city founded by the black fur trader Jean Baptiste Point du Sable—has long been a pioneer. The efforts began in earnest in 1917, when the Chicago Real Estate Board, horrified by the influx of southern blacks, lobbied to zone the entire city by race. But after the Supreme Court ruled against explicit racial zoning that year, the city was forced to pursue its agenda by more-discreet means.
Like the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration initially insisted on restrictive covenants, which helped bar blacks and other ethnic undesirables from receiving federally backed home loans. By the 1940s, Chicago led the nation in the use of these restrictive covenants, and about half of all residential neighborhoods in the city were effectively off-limits to blacks.
It is common today to become misty-eyed about the old black ghetto, where doctors and lawyers lived next door to meatpackers and steelworkers, who themselves lived next door to prostitutes and the unemployed. This segregationist nostalgia ignores the actual conditions endured by the people living there—vermin and arson, for instance—and ignores the fact that the old ghetto was premised on denying black people privileges enjoyed by white Americans.
In 1948, when the Supreme Court ruled that restrictive covenants, while permissible, were not enforceable by judicial action, Chicago had other weapons at the ready. The Illinois state legislature had already given Chicago’s city council the right to approve—and thus to veto—any public housing in the city’s wards. This came in handy in 1949, when a new federal housing act sent millions of tax dollars into Chicago and other cities around the country. Beginning in 1950, site selection for public housing proceeded entirely on the grounds of segregation. By the 1960s, the city had created with its vast housing projects what the historian Arnold R. Hirsch calls a “second ghetto,” one larger than the old Black Belt but just as impermeable. More than 98 percent of all the family public-housing units built in Chicago between 1950 and the mid‑1960s were built in all-black neighborhoods.
Governmental embrace of segregation was driven by the virulent racism of Chicago’s white citizens. White neighborhoods vulnerable to black encroachment formed block associations for the sole purpose of enforcing segregation. They lobbied fellow whites not to sell. They lobbied those blacks who did manage to buy to sell back. In 1949, a group of Englewood Catholics formed block associations intended to “keep up the neighborhood.” Translation: keep black people out. And when civic engagement was not enough, when government failed, when private banks could no longer hold the line, Chicago turned to an old tool in the American repertoire—racial violence. “The pattern of terrorism is easily discernible,” concluded a Chicago civic group in the 1940s. “It is at the seams of the black ghetto in all directions.” On July 1 and 2 of 1946, a mob of thousands assembled in Chicago’s Park Manor neighborhood, hoping to eject a black doctor who’d recently moved in. The mob pelted the house with rocks and set the garage on fire. The doctor moved away.
In 1947, after a few black veterans moved into the Fernwood section of Chicago, three nights of rioting broke out; gangs of whites yanked blacks off streetcars and beat them. Two years later, when a union meeting attended by blacks in Englewood triggered rumors that a home was being “sold to niggers,” blacks (and whites thought to be sympathetic to them) were beaten in the streets. In 1951, thousands of whites in Cicero, 20 minutes or so west of downtown Chicago, attacked an apartment building that housed a single black family, throwing bricks and firebombs through the windows and setting the apartment on fire. A Cook County grand jury declined to charge the rioters—and instead indicted the family’s NAACP attorney, the apartment’s white owner, and the owner’s attorney and rental agent, charging them with conspiring to lower property values. Two years after that, whites picketed and planted explosives in South Deering, about 30 minutes from downtown Chicago, to force blacks out.
The September 1966 Cicero protest against housing discrimination was one of the first nonviolent civil-rights campaigns launched near a major city. (Associated Press)
When terrorism ultimately failed, white homeowners simply fled the neighborhood. The traditional terminology, white flight, implies a kind of natural expression of preference. In fact, white flight was a triumph of social engineering, orchestrated by the shared racist presumptions of America’s public and private sectors. For should any nonracist white families decide that integration might not be so bad as a matter of principle or practicality, they still had to contend with the hard facts of American housing policy: When the mid-20th-century white homeowner claimed that the presence of a Bill and Daisy Myers decreased his property value, he was not merely engaging in racist dogma—he was accurately observing the impact of federal policy on market prices. Redlining destroyed the possibility of investment wherever black people lived.
VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
Speculators in North Lawndale, and at the edge of the black ghettos, knew there was money to be made off white panic. They resorted to “block-busting”—spooking whites into selling cheap before the neighborhood became black. They would hire a black woman to walk up and down the street with a stroller. Or they’d hire someone to call a number in the neighborhood looking for “Johnny Mae.” Then they’d cajole whites into selling at low prices, informing them that the more blacks who moved in, the more the value of their homes would decline, so better to sell now. With these white-fled homes in hand, speculators then turned to the masses of black people who had streamed northward as part of the Great Migration, or who were desperate to escape the ghettos: the speculators would take the houses they’d just bought cheap through block-busting and sell them to blacks on contract.
To keep up with his payments and keep his heat on, Clyde Ross took a second job at the post office and then a third job delivering pizza. His wife took a job working at Marshall Field. He had to take some of his children out of private school. He was not able to be at home to supervise his children or help them with their homework. Money and time that Ross wanted to give his children went instead to enrich white speculators.
“The problem was the money,” Ross told me. “Without the money, you can’t move. You can’t educate your kids. You can’t give them the right kind of food. Can’t make the house look good. They think this neighborhood is where they supposed to be. It changes their outlook. My kids were going to the best schools in this neighborhood, and I couldn’t keep them in there.”
Mattie Lewis came to Chicago from her native Alabama in the mid-’40s, when she was 21, persuaded by a friend who told her she could get a job as a hairdresser. Instead she was hired by Western Electric, where she worked for 41 years. I met Lewis in the home of her neighbor Ethel Weatherspoon. Both had owned homes in North Lawndale for more than 50 years. Both had bought their houses on contract. Both had been active with Clyde Ross in the Contract Buyers League’s effort to garner restitution from contract sellers who’d operated in North Lawndale, banks who’d backed the scheme, and even the Federal Housing Administration. We were joined by Jack Macnamara, who’d been an organizing force in the Contract Buyers League when it was founded, in 1968. Our gathering had the feel of a reunion, because the writer James Alan McPherson had profiled the Contract Buyers League for The Atlantic back in 1972.
Click the image above to download a PDF version of The Atlantic’s April 1972 profile of the Contract Buyers League.
Weatherspoon bought her home in 1957. “Most of the whites started moving out,” she told me. “‘The blacks are coming. The blacks are coming.’ They actually said that. They had signs up: Don’t sell to blacks.”
Before moving to North Lawndale, Lewis and her husband tried moving to Cicero after seeing a house advertised for sale there. “Sorry, I just sold it today,” the Realtor told Lewis’s husband. “I told him, ‘You know they don’t want you in Cicero,’ ” Lewis recalls. “ ‘They ain’t going to let nobody black in Cicero.’ ”
In 1958, the couple bought a home in North Lawndale on contract. They were not blind to the unfairness. But Lewis, born in the teeth of Jim Crow, considered American piracy—black people keep on making it, white people keep on taking it—a fact of nature. “All I wanted was a house. And that was the only way I could get it. They weren’t giving black people loans at that time,” she said. “We thought, ‘This is the way it is. We going to do it till we die, and they ain’t never going to accept us. That’s just the way it is.’
“The only way you were going to buy a home was to do it the way they wanted,” she continued. “And I was determined to get me a house. If everybody else can have one, I want one too. I had worked for white people in the South. And I saw how these white people were living in the North and I thought, ‘One day I’m going to live just like them.’ I wanted cabinets and all these things these other people have.”
White flight was not an accident—it was a triumph of racist social engineering.
Whenever she visited white co-workers at their homes, she saw the difference. “I could see we were just getting ripped off,” she said. “I would see things and I would say, ‘I’d like to do this at my house.’ And they would say, ‘Do it,’ but I would think, ‘I can’t, because it costs us so much more.’ ”
I asked Lewis and Weatherspoon how they kept up on payments.
“You paid it and kept working,” Lewis said of the contract. “When that payment came up, you knew you had to pay it.”
“You cut down on the light bill. Cut down on your food bill,” Weatherspoon interjected.
Ethel Weatherspoon at her home in North Lawndale. After she bought it in 1957, she says, “most of the whites started moving out.” (Carlos Javier Ortiz)
“You cut down on things for your child, that was the main thing,” said Lewis. “My oldest wanted to be an artist and my other wanted to be a dancer and my other wanted to take music.”
Lewis and Weatherspoon, like Ross, were able to keep their homes. The suit did not win them any remuneration. But it forced contract sellers to the table, where they allowed some members of the Contract Buyers League to move into regular mortgages or simply take over their houses outright. By then they’d been bilked for thousands. In talking with Lewis and Weatherspoon, I was seeing only part of the picture—the tiny minority who’d managed to hold on to their homes. But for all our exceptional ones, for every Barack and Michelle Obama, for every Ethel Weatherspoon or Clyde Ross, for every black survivor, there are so many thousands gone.
Deputy sheriffs patrol a Chicago street in 1970 after a dozen Contract Buyers League families were evicted. (Courtesy of Sun-Times Media)
“A lot of people fell by the way,” Lewis told me. “One woman asked me if I would keep all her china. She said, ‘They ain’t going to set you out.’ ”
VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
On a recent spring afternoon in North Lawndale, I visited Billy Lamar Brooks Sr. Brooks has been an activist since his youth in the Black Panther Party, when he aided the Contract Buyers League. I met him in his office at the Better Boys Foundation, a staple of North Lawndale whose mission is to direct local kids off the streets and into jobs and college. Brooks’s work is personal. On June 14, 1991, his 19-year-old son, Billy Jr., was shot and killed. “These guys tried to stick him up,” Brooks told me. “I suspect he could have been involved in some things … He’s always on my mind. Every day.”
Brooks was not raised in the streets, though in such a neighborhood it is impossible to avoid the influence. “I was in church three or four times a week. That’s where the girls were,” he said, laughing. “The stark reality is still there. There’s no shield from life. You got to go to school. I lived here. I went to Marshall High School. Over here were the Egyptian Cobras. Over there were the Vice Lords.”
Brooks has since moved away from Chicago’s West Side. But he is still working in North Lawndale. If “you got a nice house, you live in a nice neighborhood, then you are less prone to violence, because your space is not deprived,” Brooks said. “You got a security point. You don’t need no protection.” But if “you grow up in a place like this, housing sucks. When they tore down the projects here, they left the high-rises and came to the neighborhood with that gang mentality. You don’t have nothing, so you going to take something, even if it’s not real. You don’t have no street, but in your mind it’s yours.”
Visit North Lawndale today with Billy Brooks
We walked over to a window behind his desk. A group of young black men were hanging out in front of a giant mural memorializing two black men: In Lovin Memory Quentin aka “Q,” July 18, 1974 ❤ March 2, 2012. The name and face of the other man had been spray-painted over by a rival group. The men drank beer. Occasionally a car would cruise past, slow to a crawl, then stop. One of the men would approach the car and make an exchange, then the car would drive off. Brooks had known all of these young men as boys.
“That’s their corner,” he said.
We watched another car roll through, pause briefly, then drive off. “No respect, no shame,” Brooks said. “That’s what they do. From that alley to that corner. They don’t go no farther than that. See the big brother there? He almost died a couple of years ago. The one drinking the beer back there … I know all of them. And the reason they feel safe here is cause of this building, and because they too chickenshit to go anywhere. But that’s their mentality. That’s their block.”
Brooks showed me a picture of a Little League team he had coached. He went down the row of kids, pointing out which ones were in jail, which ones were dead, and which ones were doing all right. And then he pointed out his son—“That’s my boy, Billy,” Brooks said. Then he wondered aloud if keeping his son with him while working in North Lawndale had hastened his death. “It’s a definite connection, because he was part of what I did here. And I think maybe I shouldn’t have exposed him. But then, I had to,” he said, “because I wanted him with me.”
From the White House on down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr. had a father. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder. Adhering to middle-class norms is what made Ethel Weatherspoon a lucrative target for rapacious speculators. Contract sellers did not target the very poor. They targeted black people who had worked hard enough to save a down payment and dreamed of the emblem of American citizenship—homeownership. It was not a tangle of pathology that put a target on Clyde Ross’s back. It was not a culture of poverty that singled out Mattie Lewis for “the thrill of the chase and the kill.” Some black people always will be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast.
Liberals today mostly view racism not as an active, distinct evil but as a relative of white poverty and inequality. They ignore the long tradition of this country actively punishing black success—and the elevation of that punishment, in the mid-20th century, to federal policy. President Lyndon Johnson may have noted in his historic civil-rights speech at Howard University in 1965 that “Negro poverty is not white poverty.” But his advisers and their successors were, and still are, loath to craft any policy that recognizes the difference.
After his speech, Johnson convened a group of civil-rights leaders, including the esteemed A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, to address the “ancient brutality.” In a strategy paper, they agreed with the president that “Negro poverty is a special, and particularly destructive, form of American poverty.” But when it came to specifically addressing the “particularly destructive,” Rustin’s group demurred, preferring to advance programs that addressed “all the poor, black and white.”
The urge to use the moral force of the black struggle to address broader inequalities originates in both compassion and pragmatism. But it makes for ambiguous policy. Affirmative action’s precise aims, for instance, have always proved elusive. Is it meant to make amends for the crimes heaped upon black people? Not according to the Supreme Court. In its 1978 ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Court rejected “societal discrimination” as “an amorphous concept of injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past.” Is affirmative action meant to increase “diversity”? If so, it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people—the problem of what America has taken from them over several centuries.
This confusion about affirmative action’s aims, along with our inability to face up to the particular history of white-imposed black disadvantage, dates back to the policy’s origins. “There is no fixed and firm definition of affirmative action,” an appointee in Johnson’s Department of Labor declared. “Affirmative action is anything that you have to do to get results. But this does not necessarily include preferential treatment.”
Yet America was built on the preferential treatment of white people—395 years of it. Vaguely endorsing a cuddly, feel-good diversity does very little to redress this.
Today, progressives are loath to invoke white supremacy as an explanation for anything. On a practical level, the hesitation comes from the dim view the Supreme Court has taken of the reforms of the 1960s. The Voting Rights Act has been gutted. The Fair Housing Act might well be next. Affirmative action is on its last legs. In substituting a broad class struggle for an anti-racist struggle, progressives hope to assemble a coalition by changing the subject.
The politics of racial evasion are seductive. But the record is mixed. Aid to Families With Dependent Children was originally written largely to exclude blacks—yet by the 1990s it was perceived as a giveaway to blacks. The Affordable Care Act makes no mention of race, but this did not keep Rush Limbaugh from denouncing it as reparations. Moreover, the act’s expansion of Medicaid was effectively made optional, meaning that many poor blacks in the former Confederate states do not benefit from it. The Affordable Care Act, like Social Security, will eventually expand its reach to those left out; in the meantime, black people will be injured.
Billy Brooks, who assisted the Contract Buyers League, still works in the neighborhood, helping kids escape poverty and violence. (Carlos Javier Ortiz)
“All that it would take to sink a new WPA program would be some skillfully packaged footage of black men leaning on shovels smoking cigarettes,” the sociologist Douglas S. Massey writes. “Papering over the issue of race makes for bad social theory, bad research, and bad public policy.” To ignore the fact that one of the oldest republics in the world was erected on a foundation of white supremacy, to pretend that the problems of a dual society are the same as the problems of unregulated capitalism, is to cover the sin of national plunder with the sin of national lying. The lie ignores the fact that reducing American poverty and ending white supremacy are not the same. The lie ignores the fact that closing the “achievement gap” will do nothing to close the “injury gap,” in which black college graduates still suffer higher unemployment rates than white college graduates, and black job applicants without criminal records enjoy roughly the same chance of getting hired as white applicants with criminal records.
Chicago, like the country at large, embraced policies that placed black America’s most energetic, ambitious, and thrifty countrymen beyond the pale of society and marked them as rightful targets for legal theft. The effects reverberate beyond the families who were robbed to the community that beholds the spectacle. Don’t just picture Clyde Ross working three jobs so he could hold on to his home. Think of his North Lawndale neighbors—their children, their nephews and nieces—and consider how watching this affects them. Imagine yourself as a young black child watching your elders play by all the rules only to have their possessions tossed out in the street and to have their most sacred possession—their home—taken from them.
The message the young black boy receives from his country, Billy Brooks says, is “ ‘You ain’t shit. You not no good. The only thing you are worth is working for us. You will never own anything. You not going to get an education. We are sending your ass to the penitentiary.’ They’re telling you no matter how hard you struggle, no matter what you put down, you ain’t shit. ‘We’re going to take what you got. You will never own anything, nigger.’ ”
IX. Toward A New Country
When Clyde Ross was a child, his older brother Winter had a seizure. He was picked up by the authorities and delivered to Parchman Farm, a 20,000-acre state prison in the Mississippi Delta region.
“He was a gentle person,” Clyde Ross says of his brother. “You know, he was good to everybody. And he started having spells, and he couldn’t control himself. And they had him picked up, because they thought he was dangerous.”
Built at the turn of the century, Parchman was supposed to be a progressive and reformist response to the problem of “Negro crime.” In fact it was the gulag of Mississippi, an object of terror to African Americans in the Delta. In the early years of the 20th century, Mississippi Governor James K. Vardaman used to amuse himself by releasing black convicts into the surrounding wilderness and hunting them down with bloodhounds. “Throughout the American South,” writes David M. Oshinsky in his book Worse Than Slavery, “Parchman Farm is synonymous with punishment and brutality, as well it should be … Parchman is the quintessential penal farm, the closest thing to slavery that survived the Civil War.”
When the Ross family went to retrieve Winter, the authorities told them that Winter had died. When the Ross family asked for his body, the authorities at Parchman said they had buried him. The family never saw Winter’s body.
And this was just one of their losses.
Scholars have long discussed methods by which America might make reparations to those on whose labor and exclusion the country was built. In the 1970s, the Yale Law professor Boris Bittker argued in The Case for Black Reparations that a rough price tag for reparations could be determined by multiplying the number of African Americans in the population by the difference in white and black per capita income. That number—$34 billion in 1973, when Bittker wrote his book—could be added to a reparations program each year for a decade or two. Today Charles Ogletree, the Harvard Law School professor, argues for something broader: a program of job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races.
To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting America’s origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte.
Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap. Reparations would seek to close this chasm. But as surely as the creation of the wealth gap required the cooperation of every aspect of the society, bridging it will require the same.
Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate—the kind that HR 40 proposes—we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion—and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper—America’s heritage, history, and standing in the world.
The early American economy was built on slave labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk traded slaves from the Oval Office. The laments about “black pathology,” the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children. An honest assessment of America’s relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer.
And this destruction did not end with slavery. Discriminatory laws joined the equal burden of citizenship to unequal distribution of its bounty. These laws reached their apex in the mid-20th century, when the federal government—through housing policies—engineered the wealth gap, which remains with us to this day. When we think of white supremacy, we picture Colored Only signs, but we should picture pirate flags.
On some level, we have always grasped this.
“Negro poverty is not white poverty,” President Johnson said in his historic civil-rights speech.
Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.
We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize our links to the past—at least when they flatter us. But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter. Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it.
And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.
Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.
What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.
X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
We are not the first to be summoned to such a challenge.
In 1952, when West Germany began the process of making amends for the Holocaust, it did so under conditions that should be instructive to us. Resistance was violent. Very few Germans believed that Jews were entitled to anything. Only 5 percent of West Germans surveyed reported feeling guilty about the Holocaust, and only 29 percent believed that Jews were owed restitution from the German people.
“The rest,” the historian Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book, Postwar, “were divided between those (some two-fifths of respondents) who thought that only people ‘who really committed something’ were responsible and should pay, and those (21 percent) who thought ‘that the Jews themselves were partly responsible for what happened to them during the Third Reich.’ ”
Germany’s unwillingness to squarely face its history went beyond polls. Movies that suggested a societal responsibility for the Holocaust beyond Hitler were banned. “The German soldier fought bravely and honorably for his homeland,” claimed President Eisenhower, endorsing the Teutonic national myth. Judt wrote, “Throughout the fifties West German officialdom encouraged a comfortable view of the German past in which the Wehrmacht was heroic, while Nazis were in a minority and properly punished.”
Konrad Adenauer, the postwar German chancellor, was in favor of reparations, but his own party was divided, and he was able to get an agreement passed only with the votes of the Social Democratic opposition.
Among the Jews of Israel, reparations provoked violent and venomous reactions ranging from denunciation to assassination plots. On January 7, 1952, as the Knesset—the Israeli parliament—convened to discuss the prospect of a reparations agreement with West Germany, Menachem Begin, the future prime minister of Israel, stood in front of a large crowd, inveighing against the country that had plundered the lives, labor, and property of his people. Begin claimed that all Germans were Nazis and guilty of murder. His condemnations then spread to his own young state. He urged the crowd to stop paying taxes and claimed that the nascent Israeli nation characterized the fight over whether or not to accept reparations as a “war to the death.” When alerted that the police watching the gathering were carrying tear gas, allegedly of German manufacture, Begin yelled, “The same gases that asphyxiated our parents!”
Begin then led the crowd in an oath to never forget the victims of the Shoah, lest “my right hand lose its cunning” and “my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.” He took the crowd through the streets toward the Knesset. From the rooftops, police repelled the crowd with tear gas and smoke bombs. But the wind shifted, and the gas blew back toward the Knesset, billowing through windows shattered by rocks. In the chaos, Begin and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion exchanged insults. Two hundred civilians and 140 police officers were wounded. Nearly 400 people were arrested. Knesset business was halted.
Begin then addressed the chamber with a fiery speech condemning the actions the legislature was about to take. “Today you arrested hundreds,” he said. “Tomorrow you may arrest thousands. No matter, they will go, they will sit in prison. We will sit there with them. If necessary, we will be killed with them. But there will be no ‘reparations’ from Germany.”
Nahum Goldman, the president of the Jewish Claims Commission (center), signs 1952 reparations agreements between Germany and Israel. The two delegations entered the room by different doors, and the ceremony was carried out in silence. (Associated Press)
Survivors of the Holocaust feared laundering the reputation of Germany with money, and mortgaging the memory of their dead. Beyond that, there was a taste for revenge. “My soul would be at rest if I knew there would be 6 million German dead to match the 6 million Jews,” said Meir Dworzecki, who’d survived the concentration camps of Estonia.
Ben-Gurion countered this sentiment, not by repudiating vengeance but with cold calculation: “If I could take German property without sitting down with them for even a minute but go in with jeeps and machine guns to the warehouses and take it, I would do that—if, for instance, we had the ability to send a hundred divisions and tell them, ‘Take it.’ But we can’t do that.”
The reparations conversation set off a wave of bomb attempts by Israeli militants. One was aimed at the foreign ministry in Tel Aviv. Another was aimed at Chancellor Adenauer himself. And one was aimed at the port of Haifa, where the goods bought with reparations money were arriving. West Germany ultimately agreed to pay Israel 3.45 billion deutsche marks, or more than $7 billion in today’s dollars. Individual reparations claims followed—for psychological trauma, for offense to Jewish honor, for halting law careers, for life insurance, for time spent in concentration camps. Seventeen percent of funds went toward purchasing ships. “By the end of 1961, these reparations vessels constituted two-thirds of the Israeli merchant fleet,” writes the Israeli historian Tom Segev in his book The Seventh Million. “From 1953 to 1963, the reparations money funded about a third of the total investment in Israel’s electrical system, which tripled its capacity, and nearly half the total investment in the railways.”
Israel’s GNP tripled during the 12 years of the agreement. The Bank of Israel attributed 15 percent of this growth, along with 45,000 jobs, to investments made with reparations money. But Segev argues that the impact went far beyond that. Reparations “had indisputable psychological and political importance,” he writes.
Reparations could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis. But they did launch Germany’s reckoning with itself, and perhaps provided a road map for how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name.
Assessing the reparations agreement, David Ben-Gurion said:
For the first time in the history of relations between people, a precedent has been created by which a great State, as a result of moral pressure alone, takes it upon itself to pay compensation to the victims of the government that preceded it. For the first time in the history of a people that has been persecuted, oppressed, plundered and despoiled for hundreds of years in the countries of Europe, a persecutor and despoiler has been obliged to return part of his spoils and has even undertaken to make collective reparation as partial compensation for material losses.
Something more than moral pressure calls America to reparations. We cannot escape our history. All of our solutions to the great problems of health care, education, housing, and economic inequality are troubled by what must go unspoken. “The reason black people are so far behind now is not because of now,” Clyde Ross told me. “It’s because of then.” In the early 2000s, Charles Ogletree went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to meet with the survivors of the 1921 race riot that had devastated “Black Wall Street.” The past was not the past to them. “It was amazing seeing these black women and men who were crippled, blind, in wheelchairs,” Ogletree told me. “I had no idea who they were and why they wanted to see me. They said, ‘We want you to represent us in this lawsuit.’ ”
In the spring of 1921, a white mob leveled “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Here, wounded prisoners ride in an Army truck during the martial law imposed by the Oklahoma governor in response to the race riot. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)
A commission authorized by the Oklahoma legislature produced a report affirming that the riot, the knowledge of which had been suppressed for years, had happened. But the lawsuit ultimately failed, in 2004. Similar suits pushed against corporations such as Aetna (which insured slaves) and Lehman Brothers (whose co-founding partner owned them) also have thus far failed. These results are dispiriting, but the crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves i...
When Caroline Eisenmann, a young assistant at a New York literary agency, decided to rename her OkCupid profile, she wanted something that would make her stand out—a name that wouldn’t get lost amongst the omnipresent references to indie bands and cute animals, something that was “flippant” but with “a bit of a melancholic undertone” that would attract a suitably urbane mate, Eisenmann told me. Fingers poised over the keyboard, she wrote:
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
OkCupid rejected it. That it wouldn't accept the lopsided, grinning face with upturned palms is almost strange: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is, and was, part of the language of the internet, and it has been popping up more than ever in tweets, work emails, and gchats from friends.
The shruggie or “smugshrug,” as it is sometimes called, is what's known as a “kaomoji,” or “face mark” in Japanese. It's similar to an emoji or emoticon, but it incorporates characters from the katakana alphabet, instead of underscores and carets, for a wider range of expression. (The (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ table flip is a favorite.) It went viral in English when, after Kanye West shot down Taylor Swift in favor of Beyonce during his infamous 2010 Video Music Awards interruption, he gave a little shrug with his hands outstretched in a slight acknowledgement of his own ridiculousness; the rap crew Travis Porter immediately tweeted, “Kanye shrug —> ¯\_(ツ)_/¯” as a crude representation of the gesture. For a time, post-Kanye, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ continued to represent a kind of self-aware victory over the world: It was appropriated as the victory trademark of SeleCT, a competition-level Starcraft II player from Team Dignitas, after which it became known as “sup son,” and by late 2011, it was parodied on YouTube by Starcraft competition announcers and plastered on signs held up by fans.
After seeing the light of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, it’s hard to not notice it everywhere. Han Solo makes the gesture in Star Wars, as Reddit noticed in 2012. Daily Dot writer Miles Klee caught the Spider-Man super villain Mysterio doing it. In 2013, it appeared in a Reddit post that commanded users “lol idk just upvote.” “Lol idk” seems like a fairly apt description of the shruggie’s meaning, but it also doesn’t begin to describe the nihilism that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ embodies today.
It was the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ of times, it was the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ of times.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is fundamentally connected to the experience of being online, in part because it cannot be spoken, only acted or typed. “Well, it's like, the default Internet feeling,” Shane Ferro, an editor at Reuters, told me. She uses it “while gchatting a lot for ‘there is outrage on the Internet, but I just can't today.’” Amazon editor Kevin Nguyen has it saved in his phone under the shortcut “IDGAF,” “but I realize that I don't really use it to mean ‘I don't give a fuck,’” he said. “It represents a way to acknowledging that maybe we take ourselves too seriously on the Internet.” Writer Molly Osberg explained that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is “the natural answer to spending too much time in Internet c a s c a d e.”
Yet it also transcends the Internet and perhaps language itself, echoing incoherent expressions of sublime rage or terror, like the untranslatable keyboard smash, “asdfasldkvhjasd.” “There’s no parallel word, but it stands in for any number of horrified and numb and nihilistic sentiments… like ‘I don’t even have the bandwidth to comprehend how terrible this all is,’” Osberg said. She suggested an example sentence: “Would mass human extinction rly even be a bad thing? I awno ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.”
“There's always a bit of a melancholic undertone. It's like if YOLO grew from a reckless teen to an overly pensive twenty-something,” Eisenmann said. “The reason it works so well to convey bemused resignation must be some combination of the little half-smile and the wide arm-spread,” Wordnik founder Erin McKean explained. “PURE RESIGNATION, that’s my definition, caps included,” Jezebel contributor Phoenix Tso told me.
But, in addition to symbolizing despair, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ can be wielded as a Zen-like tool to accept the chaos of universe. Meditate on its wide eyes and upturned mouth; that’s not the expression of a quitter, it’s the carefree face of #blessed, radical openness.
walked 65 blocks home so i could get pizza without feeling guilty and then in the middle i got hungry and ate chipotle instead ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
When someone performs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ in real life, shrugging their shoulders and raising their outstretched hands in supplication to the sky it evokes an abdication of blame and a good-humored acknowledgement that shit, at times, happens, and there’s nothing we can do about it. “I think it’s obviously a ‘dealing with it’ vibe,” Vox Media designer Dylan Lathrop told me. “It's a reaction more than a lifestyle, but I can definitely see people employing that vibe for their worldview.”
Rusty Foster, who writes the Today in Tabs newsletter, recently noted, “We are entering a golden age of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, which is very nearly the only reaction I am capable of having to anything.” In a yet-unpublished thousand-word manifesto, Foster writes, "11 plain black strokes perfectly capture the essence of everything I really believe most deeply. In short, my view of the whole universe is:
¯\_(ツ)_/¯.” Taking ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ the worldview to its logical conclusion, Foster makes the fatalistic argument that everything is predetermined and space-time is a false construction of the human mind:
Nobody has any actual free will, and nothing we do is chosen—what happens now is just is what happens, and we make up stories about it that make it seem like things happened for reasons and cause and effect aren't just mirages of our flawed perception of a fundamentally static and fixed system.
Why go on living in our stage-set of a world? Indeed, why even bother tweeting at all? The answer, Foster thinks, is: “¯\_(ツ)_/¯ why not?”
Kyle Chayka is a freelance technology and culture writer living in Brooklyn.
ANN ARBOR! Right state! I'm officially obsessed with this contest.
by Chris Bodenner
A reader furrows his brow:
This is a toughie. A nondescript scene of a generic Midwest downtown. The only clue I see is the low rise of hill in the near distance, which suggests that there is a moderate-sized river at its base. I’m just taking a guess with Iowa City, Iowa. Or it could be Council Bluffs, or Sioux City or …
Another heads south:
I don’t have time for searching this week so I’ll just go with my first impression. It’s someplace in the USA amid rolling hills or ridges and it peaked economically in the 1950s. I’m reminded of northeast Oklahoma, so I’ll guess Tahlequah.
The West Virginia cities of Morgantown and Charleston were also choices. One of only two non-US guesses:
Something about the VFYW picture this week seems French to me, but not in an obvious way. I’m going to go with Lausanne, Switzerland in the French part of Switzerland as my guess. My second guess is Montreal, Canada.
The other reader got thrown off by the photo’s untimely nature:
Totally looks like Minnesota or environs at first glance. But where ever it is, it looks like fall; so I’m going Southern Hemisphere and taking a stab at Hobart, Tasmania.
The photo looks like fall because it was sent to us last November. (We often have to reach back into our archives because suitable window views for the contest are hard to find.) Another reader heads to the Northeast:
As soon as I saw this picture, I thought: New Brunswick, NJ … maybe the Rutgers campus? Perhaps from a dormitory window? Not that I’ve ever been to Rutgers. And while I made a few trips to New Brunswick back in 2000 and 2001 (I had Johnson & Johnson as a client), I don’t remember any details. And yet it came instantly to mind. That’s as far as I can get. I went on Google Images looking for the graffiti tag MEKAN (still not sure I’m reading it correctly), and got plenty of hits – but none in this “font.” (Which in itself was interesting – is Mekan a real name?)
Another spots the tag from a different angle:
Another reader:
East Stroudsberg, Pennsylvania? I’m only guessing this because I got lost through this town one way, trying to find a quick place to get some food after my wife was recovering from giving birth at the nearby hospital. Wild guess but I felt it was worth a try. The place does look likes it’s up in the mountains somewhere, and the buildings seem to have that appearance of collegiate uniformity.
Another college try:
This is a photo taken from the roof of a building next to the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs – the building with the white window frames – and its extension, the Eggers Building to its left, looking out over the western part of the campus and Syracuse University. I am a 1994 M.A. in Political Science alum of the Maxwell School’s Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts (PARC) at Syracuse University. Go Orange!
Another:
I have no idea. Feels like the Northeast: tree, architecture, bricks, light. I generally do OK regarding latitude on the VFYWs, so let’s see … Worcester, Massachusetts?
Remarkable guess: the latitude of both cities is 42.2 degrees. But the window isn’t in the Northeast. Another goes with the Northwest:
Finally, you publish a VFYW contest photo of Seattle, Washington! Even though I’ve lived there for over 30 years and can’t quite put my finger on the exact Univ Washington campus location where your photographer snapped that pic, those orange-red bricks were used to build almost every building on campus. The extra bricks were used to pave Red Square.
Another gets the right state:
Detroit, Michigan? Only because that looks like a Mekan graffiti tag, and I’ve seen it around Detroit, albeit never on a non-descript rooftop that could be virtually anywhere they sell York air conditioners!
Another nails the right city:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
*drops mic*
Another picks it up for a bit of standup:
SO easy! I just Googled “American cities with rooftops,” and voila - up popped Ann Arbor! It also gave me the exact window. The fifth floor in the School of Law Building, University of Michigan. How nice to have an easy view for a change.
P.S. Lord have mercy. I’m passing this one on to Chini.
Chini and the overwhelming number of the 100 entrants went with Ann Arbor. Below is a map illustrating how relatively easy the contest was this week:
Thanks to Chas for plotting the coordinates and putting together the composite image seen below. Another reader begins the hunt for the right window:
This was a very interesting contest for people not familiar with Ann Arbor. My starting clues were the tagging on the rooftop in the middle of the view and the twin small domes to the left. Searching “Mekan” found a number of links to a tagger active in Ann Arbor and Detroit, but searching images for twin domes in Ann Arbor or Detroit was less useful (including churches in the search was not helpful). But searching images for Michigan Theater helped to further connect the clues. It took a while to figure out the the view was looking at the “back” of the theater façade top:
Another gets close to the right building:
I think the photo is taken from Corner House Apts., 205 State Street, fourth floor southwest corner, 2nd south facing window from the corner. It is renting to students, for about $2000-2500, which they assume 2-4 people are sharing. In the background is the Ashley Mews Building, with the white stripe and the black upper floors. The two little cupolas sticking up are 603 E. Liberty Street, the historic Michigan Theater.
Across the street is Lane Hall: “Today, with space wholly dedicated to the Women’s Studies Department and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Lane Hall is the University’s center of research and teaching about gender. Jointly sponsored art exhibits, a succession of intellectual events throughout the year, and casual social interactions among researchers, faculty, students, and staff have made Lane Hall into an intellectually vibrant feminist community.”
Another adds:
As a proud Ann Arborite I had to brag a little bit about some of the history that’s within half a block of where this picture was taken. The older looking building across the street is Lane Hall. It was built in 1917 and has had many uses – it is currently part of the women’s studies department. For several decades it was the center of religious, social, and philosophical debate on campus. In the late 1930s there was a series of lectures called “The Existence and Nature of God.” The lecturers were Bertrand Russell, Catholic Bishop Fulton Sheen, and Reinhold Niebuhr - sounds like just your cup of tea, Andrew.
If the camera were facing southeast instead of southwest we would see Hill Auditorium – which just celebrated it’s 100th Anniversary last year. Pretty much every great classical musician of the 20th century performed there. A documentary on its history just won an Emmy.
And just to the north used to be the University High School – whose most famous graduate was probably James Osterberg Jr. (aka Iggy Pop).
Some other rock history:
Prior to being torn down for the CVS, the building housed a cramped recording studio upstairs. My high school band, Eye Guy, recorded and produced an album there one late night in 1997: Descent of the Astral Canary.
Back to the window hunt:
From a father-son team:
We both took the “Mekan” graffiti as a starting point, something that immediatelyindicates Ann Arbor. Of course, graffiti can vary wildly, etc., so this was not dispositive. What clinched it were clues dad took from the HVAC units on the visible roofs. In the background are two extremely large-scale units; in the foreground, he adds, on top of what we now know is a CVS, are three condenser units indicative of a bar, restaurant, or other building with heavy cooling needs. That such a building would be directly across from a two-story Georgian Revival hall-type building, and in close company with other high-demand structures, strongly indicated to him that this was a university.
From there, it’s back to HVAC. Those units with visible labels are branded “York,” which distributes primarily (but not exclusively) in the north and northeast. Putting this all together, I started looking at northern universities with Georgian Revival buildings, and started with Ann Arbor. Street views of the campus turned up streetlights similar to the one in the view. Then it was just a matter of finding the right building.
Another building guess:
The graffiti gives the city away, and after a little sleuthing on Street View, the picture is either taken from a room in the back of the Bell Tower hotel or a nearby building. I will leave the maps and arrows to the experts and guess The Bell Tower Hotel, fourth floor, say room 424.
Another nails the right one:
This is my first entry, and it’s the first time I’ve ever been able to get even a VFYW city correct, so I’m terribly excited! I’m also thrilled that I got to learn a lot about the state of Ann Arbor graffiti in the process, luckily finding another great view of this same graffiti on Flickr. I’m pretty sure the photo is taken from the 202 South Thayer building on 202 South Thayer Street, Ann Arbor, MI. I couldn’t find a floor plan, so I’m just going to guess that it’s taken from the 4th floor, right at the southwest corner of the building, looking out the southernmost west-facing window.
Another 202 South Thayer entry:
Oooh, thanks a lot, nothing but rooftops and a narrow angle on a drab, nondescript cityscape. If I lived next door to this window I wouldn’t recognize the view. At least there’s one Googleable thing in it, though: the graffiti on the roof in center frame. It’s legible, thank goodness, so when I searched for “MEKAN” I found several references to a tagger who goes by that moniker and has been much discussed around Ann Arbor, Michigan. But then image searches for MEKAN hit a dead end because no one appears ever to have posted a shot of the particular tag on view.
Oh well, so then I tried simple searches for anything involving graffiti in Ann Arbor and I found several references to a place the locals call “Graffiti Alley,” which apparently is a much bruited about local attraction (this video will give you the idea):
It’s said to be next door to the Michigan Theater on Liberty Street, so that called for a quick peak at it on Streetview and Voila! No more searching necessary. We’ve arrived: there’s that brick-red monolith, the MEKAN tag, that pair of little white domes that are in the left of the view photo.
So it appears this week’s window is in the rear of the 202 South Thayer Building, on – you guessed it – South Thayer Street. Six-stories, university property, it houses four departments and is one of the few VFYWs not shot from a hotel window. I’m going to guess the Near Eastern Studies Dept., which seems to occupy the fourth floor. Any higher or lower seems unlikely, and since I’ve won my copy of the book already, then what the hell, I’ll flip a coin.
Among the few dozen readers who went with 202 South Thayer:
But the winner this week is the only correct guesser of a previous difficult contest who hasn’t yet won:
I haven’t entered one of these in a few years, but this one seemed doable, which of course means it will be the most correct responses ever and that my success will be meaningless, but here it is anyway. I started with googling “Mekan graffiti,” a pretty long shot strategy, I thought. But that led me to Ann Arbor, which fit with the general look of the picture, so I figured it was worth looking around for the red building with one window at the top center of the view. I finally found it in a nighttime view of the city, and then had to locate it on Google Maps based on that.
As depicted in the attached “Pic 1,” I drew a line from that window to the tree in front of the building with the distinctive doorway on the right hand side of the view, which confirmed that I was looking at a building above / behind / next to the CVS on S State Street:
I then spent way too long looking at the apartment building above the Buffalo Wild Wings – pulling up the property management company’s website, foursquare, yelp, anything to get a sense of which window I was looking for. After thinking for a while that the window must be pretty far back in the apartment building, I went back to my Pic 1 arrow and extended it, seeing that obviously I should be looking at the building behind the apartments. Circling the block on street view got me the address, 202 South Thayer:
Unless this is somehow the first email you’re reading, I’m sure you’re familiar with the details already, but the street view is looking south from E Washington Street, with the apartment building on the right and 202 South Thayer on the Left. I’m going with the third story window on the SW corner of the building, since it’s got to be taller than the CVS, but not by much.
Thanks for a fun, if occasionally maddening Sunday morning.
Let’s see how the winner matched up with Chini this week:
Back when I was figuring out where to go to law school I took a day trip to see U. Michigan. Unfortunately, I showed up on just about the rainiest, dreariest day of the year and chose to spend my three years in Ithaca instead; if I was gonna be cold, at least I’d be closer to NYC. If only the weather had been nicer …
This week’s view comes from Ann Arbor, Michigan. The picture was taken from the fourth floor of the Near Eastern/Judaic Studies Centers at 202 South Thayer Street and looks west southwest along a heading of 256.65 degrees. The pic was snapped around 4:41 in the afternoon, on or around November 3rd of last year, from the hallway window between rooms 4080 and 4028.
A marked view of the window is attached, as are an overhead view incorporating a blueprint of the interior and a view from the same height as the International Space Station, because why the heck not?
The photo was actually taken at 1.07 pm, revealing that Doug Chini is, in fact, human. From the submitter:
I’m thrilled to see that chose my photo for this week’s contest. It was also a great relief, because I was traveling all weekend, and had time to look at the contest only late Sunday night, thinking oh God, if this looks like I might be able to solve it, it is going to keep me up for several more hours, and I need some sleep. But then, it looked really familiar, and I could go right to bed.
I don’t remember what level of detail I gave you when I sent it in, which must have been back in the fall. So this is 202 S. Thayer St., the so-called Thayer Academic Building, 4th floor, the hallway window at the southwestern corner, looking west. Those who get the window right will then also know which area of the world I teach …
Looking forward to many interesting guesses.
By far the most interesting one this week comes from a reader who went window-hunting on foot, armed with a camera. From the end of his photo series:
Once on the scene, it was obvious that the elevation was too high. The view did not line up correctly with the building in the lower right hand corner on State Street. So, moving down one level, to the sixth floor of the structure, I came upon …
Another Dishhead!
We had a laugh about running into each other and how we were both afraid of security.
From the other intrepid Dishhead:
I’ve worked on this with my daughter – a past VFYW winner and multiple correct-guesser – and since I live in Ann Arbor it was easy for me to visit the adjacent parking structure to check out sight lines and architectural details. While I was checking things out this morning in the structure, a guy in a white shirt and tie approached me, and I figured it was parking management coming to find out just what in hell I was doing wandering around taking photos. It turns out he’s a fellow Dish reader and VFYW contestant who came to investigate the same location I was! I’ve attached a short video clip I shot of him:
HUGE OFFENDER! I think picky eaters are morally bankrupt and I say so to their faces.
by Katie Zavadski
Picky-eating adults (or PEAs) count the likes of Anderson Cooper among their ranks. Hilary Pollack infiltrated one of their online communities:
As a non-PEA, it can be difficult not to pass judgments on those who are basically encouraging a mother to shrug and supply her son with a diet entirely of gluten and sugar. But why do we care what other people eat, especially those who have such strong convictions about it that they’d rather risk becoming a pariah than try a bite of zucchini? It’s difficult to imagine that anyone would choose such an affliction.
Group founder Bob K. assures another exasperated parent with some resigned but hopeful food for thought:
“In most cases … hypnotherapy will fail. What we have is very hard to overcome. The good news [is that] many people that have [this issue] are gifted in other ways, and there is no reason to not have a very happy life with it.”
This may be true, but one of the more difficult parts of being a PEA—and one that they lament together with knowing words of encouragement and empathy—is the ongoing struggle with romantic relationships. Some are in happy marriages, but many others report being rejected by potential partners again and again for their seeming stubbornness. The more experienced PEAs of the group adamantly insist on being upfront about it on the first date, lest it come out as a “secret” weeks or months into a relationship. And universally, if they’re forced to choose between a babe and their French fries, the fries will prevail. Conversion is not an option, but maybe finding a kindred spirit is. And nobody wants to be lonely.
"Anyone who believes in free markets, as American conservatives profess to, should understand that few markets are as ruthless as show business. It is the customers, not some shadowy conspiratorial gatekeepers, who give comedians the hook—or catapult them into the capitalist nirvana of the one percent."
-Frank Rich, in an excellent piece for The New York Times called"Can Conservatives Be Funny?," which dives deep into the current state of conservative comedians and asks why there aren't more of them and why they aren't more successful.
A friend of mine went on a twitter rant about how hurtful it was to be called a pocket gay, which is an EXTREMELY widespread term, and it gave me one of those "duh" moments of "oh yeah don't do that, that's pretty obvious," like when a couple years ago there was a push against the word "tranny" and everyone went "oh yeah, let's not do that, let's not say 'hot tranny mess' anymore."
(I wish I could see more than 2 lines of what I typed before sharing the comment, is this even a sentence)
Reihan Salam wants the vertically challenged to stick up for one another:
As I go through life, I will occasionally say, “well, as a short person …” before making some observation. And I’ve found that my interlocutor will often interject something to the effect of, “Hey, you’re not that short,” as if to reassure me. But why would this be reassuring if there were nothing wrong with being short? This is the root of the problem. I come from a long line of fierce and proud short people, who proved resilient in the face of all manner of natural calamity. My ancestors had small bodies that were tailor-made for sweating, which allowed them to work long hours in sweltering heat in South Asia’s swampy marshlands. The notion that being short is something to be ashamed of strikes me as deeply wrongheaded.
His call for unity:
To the short men among you, I’d like to ask:
Have you ever poked fun at someone for their size? Have you done so to delight your taller friends, and to establish that you are truly one of them? If so, I’d like you to think hard about the place in hell that is reserved for your ilk. If you have no fear of hell, consider this: Do you think that your chums respect you more or less for selling out one of your own?
It is those men who hover within spitting distance of the average height who have a special obligation to stick up for short men as a whole. When other short men are getting pushed around, it is these men who must speak up. Is someone making fun of “midgets”? Now is the time to get in their face. When presented with the opportunity to seamlessly blend in with average-sized or tall people, it is these men who must reject it, and to assert the importance of treating all people fairly and humanely, regardless of their size. And if the time comes when discrimination against short people intensifies, it is these men who must join the general strike that will bring the entire architecture of anti-short-people oppression to its knees. My credo is simple: Stay short. Stay strong. And when you see a short brother in need, do something about it.
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