August 24, 2020

Hello,

Have you started to read our September book, Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women by Kate Manne? My coworker got me all fired up about it and I blazed through the first three chapters without moving from the couch (I know that such a lack of interruption is a luxury). To be honest, I was a little concerned that this book would be so full of depressing facts and figures that it would leave me in a disheartened funk. I needn't have been concerned and can't remember the last time that I was so riveted by a full length non fiction publication. Manne has rich footnotes worth flipping and back for and there is one that I think is especially important to bring to everyone's attention, as even just the title of the book can beg the question:

It's worth noting that male privilege - like privilege of other forms, e.g., white privilege - has many dimensions aside from entitlement. And while one can and should of course aim as a privileged person (like me, for the record, in every respect but gender) not to act in objectionably entitled ways, there is often a limit to how much one can feasibly renounce (as opposed to recognizing and mitigating) one's privilege....As will emerge throughout this book, white women's privilege and sense of entitlement is an important topic in its own right.

Happy reading!

The Weekly Three

1. Something to watch: The title of this video is Why a Prominent American Artist Paints Skin Pitch-Black. Artist Grace Lynn Hayes painted Sojourner Truth for the cover of The New Yorker for the anniversary of (white) women's right to vote and takes us through her creative process. She explains that in art school, there were no black models and so she did not learn technique for painting black skin, which led to what is now her signature style. This brought to mind the recent controversies over the Simone Biles Vogue cover and the Viola Davis Vanity Fair cover. 

2. Something about citizenship: For most of my life, I never much thought about my status as a US citizen. This changed when I met some of whom are now my dearest friends and are not American born and when some of our national policies regarding immigrants created what many would call a humanitarian crisis. I hadn't thought much about work visas, about sponsorship, about interviews for visa extensions or green cards or the cost of applying for any of these things. In Conditional Citizens, Laila Lalami draws on her own experience as a Moroccan immigrant to explore "the rights, liberties, and protections that are traditionally associated with American citizenship" and "how accidents of birth–such as national origin, race, or gender–that once determined the boundaries of Americanness still cast their shadows today". 

3. Something from Katie Hill about reclaiming the nakedness that led to her resignation:  "Women seem to have a harder time recovering from scandal, at least in the political world where they were so long outnumbered." She was condemned by many as immoral, disappointing to those who felt her response was "allowing the double standard to stand" and fearful of being a hypocrite if she stayed in office. Her story could easily fit into both Manne's Entitled and Down Girl.

photo credit: The New York Times

Have an excellent week,

Amber