Disappointment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  The sex in TV and movies can be simultaneously explicit and evasive. Sex, particularly noncommitted sex, is typically presented as fun and advisable; rarely is it awkward or silly or challenging or messy or actively negotiated or preceded by discussion of contraception and disease protection. There’s always plenty of room in the backseat of those limousines, and nary a pothole in the road. Of course there are exceptions: Glee in its early seasons deftly portrayed issues surrounding teen pregnancy, sex and disability, homosexuality, bisexuality, first intercourse, fat and slut shaming, and the nature of love. Orange Is the New Black, which was beloved by many of the girls I met, brought unprecedented gender and sexual diversity to TV. The sex in Lena Dunham’s work is radically raw. One of the most realistic (if depressing) scenes ever filmed may be found in her 2010 release, Tiny Furniture. In it Aura, a newly minted college graduate played by Dunham, finally gets together with the object of her affection, a loutish chef at the restaurant where she works. A typical Hollywood version of such an encounter—which takes place outside at night, in a metal tube on a loading dock while both partners are mostly clothed—would’ve been sleek and effortless, the woman instantly orgasmic. In Dunham’s hands, it went something like this: they kissed for ten seconds; he unzipped his fly and wordlessly shoved her head downward; he told her to “suck harder,” cursed her incessantly ringing phone, and then scuttled around her body to enter her doggie style; he pounded into her until he ejaculated, which took less than a minute; he never once looked at her face. Aura’s expression shifted from aroused to confused, to slightly disappointed, to resigned. Afterward, he bid her good-bye while checking his texts. The scene is hard to watch without cringing—it’s poignant, it’s agonizing, it’s embarrassing, and it’s real.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Luther was followed by Chytraeus (1563), Selnecker (1567), Hoe v. Honegg (1610 and 1640), and other Lutheran commentators. Calvin and Beza wisely abstained from prophetic exposition, but other Reformed divines carried out the anti-popery scheme with much learning, as Bibliander (1549 and 1559), Bullinger (1557), David Pareus (1618), Joseph Mede (the founder of the ingenious system of synchronism, in his Clavis Apocalyptica, 1627), Coccejus (1696), Vitringa (a very learned and useful commentator, 1705, 3d ed. 1721), and Joh. Albrecht Bengel (in his Gnomon, his Ordo Temporum, 1741, and especially his Erklärte Offenbarung Johannis, 1740, new ed. 1834). This truly great and good man elaborated a learned scheme of chronological interpretation, and fixed the end of the anti-Christian (papal) reign at the year 1836, and many pious people among his admirers in Würtemburg were in anxious expectation of the millennium during that year. But it passed away without any serious change, and this failure, according to Bengel’s own correct prediction, indicates a serious error in his scheme. Later writers have again and again predicted the fall of the papacy and the beginning of the millennium, advancing the date as times progress; but the years 1848 and 1870 have passed away, and the Pope still lives, enjoying a green old age, with the additional honor of infallibility, which the Fathers never heard of, which even St. Peter never claimed, and St. Paul effectually disputed at Antioch. All mathematical calculations about the second advent are doomed to disappointment, and those who want to know more than our blessed Lord knew in the days of his flesh deserve to be disappointed. "It is not for you to know times or seasons, which the Father hath set within his own authority" (Acts 1:7). This settles the question. Mystical and Symbolical Interpretations. The number is neither alphabetical nor chronological, but the mystical or symbolical name of Antichrist, who is yet to come. Here we meet again with different views. Primasius, the African commentator of the Apocalypse (a pupil of Augustin), mentions two names as giving the general characteristics of Antichrist: jAntemo" and ajrnoume, the former honori contrarius the other from ajrnevomai, to deny, by which the Antichrist is justly described, "utpote per duas partes orationis, nominis scilicet et verbi, et personae qualitas et operis insinuatur asperitas." Utterly worthless. See Lücke, p. 997. Züllig finds in the figure the name of Bileam. Not much better is Hengstenberg’s explanation: Adonikam, i.e., "The Lord arises," a good name for Antichrist (2 Thess. 2:4)! He bases it on Ezra 2:13: "The children of Adonikam, six hundred and sixty-six." Ezra gives a list of the children of Israel who returned from the captivity under Zerubbabel. What this has to do with Antichrist is difficult to see. Von Hofmann and Füller think that the number implies the personal name of Antichrist.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  6 “Even if the other man lives a thousand years twice over and yet has seen no good and experienced no enjoyment—do not both go to one place [the grave]?” 7 All the labor of man is for his mouth [for self-preservation and enjoyment], and yet the desire [of his soul] is not satisfied. [Prov 16:26 ] 8 For what advantage has the wise man over the fool [for being worldly-wise is not the secret to happiness]? What advantage has the poor man who has learned how to walk [publicly] among the living [with men’s eyes on him; for being poor is not the secret to happiness either]? 9 What the eyes see [enjoying what is available] is better than [craving] what the soul desires. This too is futility and chasing after the wind. 10 Whatever exists has already been named [long ago], and it is known what [a frail being] man is; for he cannot dispute with Him who is mightier than he. 11 For there are many other words that increase futility. What then is the advantage for a man? 12 For who [a limited by human wisdom] knows what is good for man during his lifetime, during the few days of his futile life? He spends them like a shadow [staying busy, but achieving nothing of lasting value]. For who can tell a man what will happen after him [to his work, his treasure, his plans] under the sun [after his life is over]? Ecclesiastes 7 Wisdom and Folly Contrasted 1 A good name is better than precious perfume, And the day of one’s death better than the day of one’s birth. 2 It is better to go to the house of mourning Than to go to the house of feasting, For that [day of death] is the end of every man, And the living will take it to heart and solemnly ponder its meaning. 3 Sorrow is better than laughter, For when a face is sad (deep in thought) the heart may be happy [because it is growing in wisdom]. [2 Cor 7:10 ] 4 The heart of the wise [learns when it] is in the house of mourning, But the heart of fools is [senseless] in the house of pleasure. 5 It is better to listen to the rebuke of the wise man and pursue wisdom Than for one to listen to the song of fools and pursue stupidity. 6 For like the crackling of [burning] thorn bushes under a pot, So is the laughter of the fool; And this too is vanity (futility). 7 For oppression makes a wise man foolish, And a bribe corrupts the [good judgment of the] heart. 8 The end of a matter is better than its beginning; Patience of spirit is better than haughtiness of spirit (pride). 9 Do not be eager in your heart to be angry, For anger dwells in the heart of fools.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  She said, “Do you come in peace?” And he said, “In peace.” 14 Then he said, “I have something to say to you.” And she said, “Speak.” 15 So he said, “You know that the kingdom belonged to me [as the eldest living son] and all Israel f looked to me and expected me to be king. However, the kingdom has passed [from me] and became my brother’s, for it was his from the LORD . 16 “So now I am making one request of you; do not g refuse me.” And she said to him, “Speak.” 17 He said, “Please speak to King Solomon, for he will not refuse you; ask that he may give me Abishag the Shunammite as a wife.” [1 Kin 1:1–4 ] 18 Bathsheba replied, “Very well; I will speak to the king for you.” Adonijah Executed 19 So Bathsheba went to King Solomon to speak to him for Adonijah. And the king rose to meet her, bowed before her, and sat down on his throne; then he had a throne set for her, the king’s mother, and she sat on his right. 20 Then she said, “I am making one small request of you; do not refuse me.” And the king said to her, “Ask, my mother, for I will not refuse you.” 21 So she said, “Let Abishag the Shunammite be given to your brother Adonijah as a wife.” 22 King Solomon answered and said to his mother, “And why are you asking for h Abishag the Shunammite for Adonijah? Ask the kingdom for him also—since he is my older brother—[ask it] for him and for Abiathar the priest and Joab the son of Zeruiah [his supporters]!” 23 Then King Solomon swore by the LORD , saying, “May God do the same to me, and more also, if Adonijah has not requested this [deplorable] thing against his own i life. 24 “So now, as the LORD lives, who has established me and set me on the throne of David my father, and who has made me a house as He promised, Adonijah shall indeed be put to death today.” 25 So King Solomon sent Benaiah the son of Jehoiada, and he j struck Adonijah and he died. 26 Then the king said to Abiathar the priest, “Go to Anathoth to your own fields, for you k certainly deserve to die; but I will not put you to death this day, because you carried the ark of the Lord GOD before my father David, and you suffered everything that my father endured.” 27 So Solomon dismissed Abiathar [a descendant of Eli] from being priest to the LORD , fulfilling the word of the LORD , which He had spoken concerning the house (descendants) of Eli in Shiloh. [1 Sam 2:27–36 ] Joab Executed 28 Now the news reached Joab, for Joab had supported and followed Adonijah, although he had not followed Absalom.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  16 I spoke with my heart, saying, “Behold, I have acquired great [human] wisdom and experience, more than all who were over Jerusalem before me; and my mind has observed a wealth of [moral] wisdom and [scientific] knowledge.” 17 And I set my mind to know [practical] wisdom and to discern [the character of] madness and folly [in which men seem to find satisfaction]; I realized that this too is a futile grasping and chasing after the wind. [1 Thess 5:21 ] 18 For in much [human] wisdom there is much displeasure and exasperation; increasing knowledge increases sorrow. Ecclesiastes 2 The Futility of Pleasure and Possessions 1 I SAID to myself, “Come now, I will test you with pleasure and gratification; so enjoy yourself and have a good time.” But behold, this too was vanity (futility, meaninglessness). [Luke 12:19 , 20 ] 2 I said of laughter, “It is madness,” and of pleasure, “What does it accomplish?” 3 I explored with my mind how to gratify myself with wine while [at the same time] having my mind remain steady and guide me wisely; and how to take control of foolishness, until I could see what was good for the sons of men to do under heaven all the days of their lives. 4 I made great works: I built houses for myself; I planted vineyards for myself; 5 I made gardens and orchards for myself and I planted in them all kinds of fruit trees; 6 I made pools of water for myself from which to water the forest and make the trees bud. 7 I bought male and female slaves and had slaves born in my house. I also possessed herds and flocks larger than any who preceded me in Jerusalem. 8 Also, I collected for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings and provinces. I provided for myself male singers and female singers, and the delights and pleasures of men—a many b concubines. [1 Kin 9:28 ; 10:10 , 14 , 21 ] 9 So I became great and excelled more than all who preceded me in Jerusalem. My wisdom also remained with me. 10 Whatever my eyes looked at with desire I did not refuse them. I did not withhold from my heart any pleasure, for my heart was pleased because of all my labor; and this was my reward for all my labor. 11 Then I considered all which my hands had done and labored to do, and behold, all was vanity and chasing after the wind and there was no profit (nothing of lasting value) under the sun. [Matt 16:26 ] Wisdom Excels Folly 12 So I turned to consider [secular] wisdom, madness, and folly; for what will the man do who succeeds the king? Nothing except what has already been done. 13 Then I saw that [even secular] wisdom [that brings sorrow] is better than [the pleasures of] folly and self-indulgence as light excels darkness.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  It’s easy for those of us who think pledging is wacky to feel a little smug. Yet it occurred to me that these girls who were “virgins for God” weren’t really so different from those who imagined virginity as a “gift” or even those who saw it as an embarrassment: they all believed that one sexual act would magically transform them—for better or for worse—and they all risked harm to their sexual and emotional development as a result. They all based their worth, calibrated their self-respect, and judged other girls’ characters (tacitly or overtly) based on what was happening, or not happening, between their legs. And they all were still fundamentally defining themselves by their sexuality: by whether, when, where, with whom, and how many times they’d had intercourse. By focusing on virginity, young people minimize (and often rush through) other forms of sexual expression, denying themselves the very opportunities for knowledge and experience that they seek. After all, moving slowly and intentionally with a partner is not only incredibly sensual, it’s vital to learning, truly learning, about desire, pleasure, communication, mutuality, intimacy. That’s ultimately far more life-altering than “achieving” intercourse. “‘Experience’ is a stupid way of thinking about it,” said Dennis Fortenberry, professor of pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine and one of the foremost researchers on adolescent sexuality. “If you think of it as a pool of experiences of closeness, warmth, desire, attraction, arousal, touch, orgasm—all those are part of the possibilities of sexual learning. That’s what young people should be doing. Learning about the incredibly nuanced thing we call sex that we assume will be part of their lives in different manifestations for the next sixty years or so. I don’t think I’ll see this in my lifetime, but what if we could even begin to think of actually saying to kids, ‘Spend a year or two having oral-genital sex with people that you want to do that with and really get to know what that’s about and then figure out what might follow.’”

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  The girls I met often talked about “friends with benefits” as the Holy Grail of romantic arrangements: regular sex with a caring-enough partner who makes no emotional demands of you. The truth was, though, that it could be a tricky balance to strike. “‘Friends with benefits’ is something college students say they want,” said Lisa Wade, the sociologist, “and maybe for good reason—it might be a very functional way to go. But that’s theoretical. I don’t see it happening.” Among the students she followed, neither the “benefits” nor the friendships could be maintained. “The problem is, friendliness is off the script in hookup culture. The minute someone says, ‘I like you,’ it’s interpreted as wanting a relationship. If you can’t tell someone you like them as a person, then you can’t really be friends, can you? So the only way to maintain an ongoing sexual relationship is to treat the other person badly, to be a jerk, so they know it’s not a romantic thing.” The less enthusiastic partner in those FWB encounters was not necessarily the boy. “I had two FWB situations in the past year,” said one college freshman I met. “Each time, I told the guy I don’t want a boyfriend right now. One kind of sputtered out without being discussed, but in one case he got more attached. He said, ‘I kind of want something more,’ and I was like”—she shrugged—“‘I kinda don’t.’ I liked him. It was fun to spend time together, and I was attracted to him, but in the end, I didn’t like him enough. That’s what it comes down to. And now we’re not friends anymore, really, which sucks.” Holly and Robert continued their . . . whatever it was, through the fall and winter of her sophomore year. But in March, when I checked in with her one last time via Skype, he had just broken it off. Holly, it turned out, had “caught feelings” for him and initiated “the Talk,” to DTR (define the relationship). He wasn’t interested. They hooked up one last time, on St. Patrick’s Day, when she was “incredibly intoxicated.” She described lying on top of him, naked from the waist down, and leaning in for a kiss; he turned his face away and said no. That had hurt. “I’ll say it,” she told me. “I definitely loved him, and the times he and I spent together were some of the happiest I have spent this year. To be honest, right now I feel like complete shit. But I want to make it clear: I don’t regret any of this nonrelationship. Even though we were never officially boyfriend and girlfriend, we had feelings for one another, cared for one another, and enjoyed ourselves together. So, though in many respects this is the classic example of the way the hookup culture has ‘damaged’ relationships, I want you to know: I am not a victim of that culture, but a participant in it.”

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  For a while after she left I lived with a Russian ballet dancer who, when we met at a party, had been all muscled ass, starry smile, and scraps of Pushkin but who, upon moving in, was seldom out of a stained “hapi coat” mini-dressing gown from Tokyo and a wide-mesh hairnet. He detested everything American, told depressing stories of backstage pettiness, and longed to return to the Eastern Bloc, though Budapest this time. Accordingly, I had to drill him in Hungarian vocabulary every night. He lived on nothing but potatoes sprinkled with cumin seeds and scorned my wastefulness (dinners out, cab rides). He was saving every penny for a one-way ticket to Budapest. From time to time he’d let me into his bed, but the hairnet and hapi coat had turned him from a young prince into a sort of untidy Minnie Mouse with big thighs of mushroom pallor. Then he was gone in a fury (I’d giddily torn the entire paper seal off the top of a jar of instant coffee rather than leaving half on as a leveler for the teaspoon). I drifted into a busy, dissatisfied life of amateur office work by day and professional cruising by night. The gay bars were being closed down because the mayor was cleaning up the city in anticipation of the World’s Fair. One day a new bar would open up way west, south of Canal, in a no-man’s-land, and we’d all rush down there, jungle tomtoms having given us the address and hours. But three days later the police raided the bar. We ran up the back stairs, leapt from roof to roof, and clattered down a neighbor’s fire exit into a night panicky with silently revolving red lights and the muffled racket of messages radioed to the squad car. Then a place opened off Times Square, near the Peppermint Lounge where the Twist had started, and we were up there dancing at the back on a small floor behind a Spanish metal grille strung with Christmas tree lights that began to twinkle the minute a suspected plainclothesman walked in; that was our signal to break apart. But that bar was closed down, too. Subway toilets, last cleaned and stocked with paper towels on the eve of World War I, were sudden descents into the filthy, thrilling tropics. On the way home from the office, my stomach sour from coffee, frustration, and boredom, I’d sway against strangers and read the subway ads for the tenth time. Because a novel—these words—is shared experience, a clumsy but sometimes funny conversation between two people in which one of them is doing all the talking, it will always be tighter and more luminous than that object called living. There is something so insipid about living that to do it at all requires heroism or stupidity, probably both. Living is all those days and years, the rushes; memory edits them; this page is the final print, music added.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  However, we should also understand Bambara’s turn to the anthology composed of actual writing by multiple Black women authors as its own kind of Black feminist intellectual method that could disrupt the supremacy of lists dominated by men. Alice Walker reminds us that Zora Neale Hurston was almost relegated to obscurity because of the inherent sexism in received lists and canons of important Black thinkers. She writes: “[T]he first time I heard Zora’s name, I was auditing a Black literature class taught by the great poet Margaret Walker, at Jackson State College, in Jackson, Mississippi. ... The class was studying the ‘usual’ giants of Black literature: Chesnutt, Toomer, Hughes, Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin with the hope of reaching LeRoi Jones very soon. Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Ann Petry, Paule Marshall ... and Zora Neale Hurston were names appended, like verbal footnotes, to the illustrious all-male list that paralleled them.” 63 Black women’s repeated encounters with the “all-male list” have structured every facet of our intellectual lives.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Through her narration of the personal experiences of marriage and motherhood, and her more public experiences of intellectual and political development, she demonstrates the manner in which her social location as a Black woman uniquely shaped each of these experiences. Terrell’s autobiography should be understood within the context of her broader political framework of “proper, dignified agitation.” For instance, invoking language identical to that found in the epigraph to this chapter, she writes, “I have not tried to arouse the sympathy of my readers by tearing passion to tatters, so as to show how wretched I have been.” 36 By reminding her audience that she refused to use unnecessarily incendiary and divisive speech, she invoked her own notion of dignified agitation: “I do not want to wage a holy war or any other kind of war upon a group which is strong and powerful enough to circumscribe my activities and prevent me from entering fields in which I should like to work. ... No colored woman in her right mind who has had as many genuine friends in the dominant race as I have had ... could be bitter toward the whole group.” 37 Becoming conciliatory and racially respectable in tone, Terrell undoubtedly wanted to win the trust and confidence of her audience, whom she clearly understood to be multiracial. She also returns to this sentiment at the end of the book: In writing the story of my life I might have related many more incidents than I have, showing my discouragement and despair at the obstacles and limitations placed upon me because I am a colored woman. Several times I have been desperate and wondered which way I should turn. I have purposely refrained from entering too deeply into particulars and emphasizing this phase of my life. I have given the bitter with the sweet, the sweet predominating, I think. 38 In speaking of what is not spoken about in her narrative, of her inability “to tell the whole truth,” Terrell points us to an absence that is at the heart of this project. Carla Peterson, drawing on the work of postcolonial theorists, argues that these kinds of elisions in African American women’s literature signal a challenge to the boundaries of dominant discourse by “inscribing both presence and absence in [these] texts.” 39 Terrell, then, resists narrating a story of discouragement, despair, and desperation but fully acknowledges the ways that her encounters with racism and sexism have produced this full range of emotion. Instead, she focuses on a more public story of triumph, one that is perhaps more politically palatable. In this regard, the public nature of her story fits with Williams’s conception of organized anxiety as the kind of animating emotional ethos of Black public life. Terrell does not deny the range of anxiety-producing experiences, but she frames these experiences in terms of how they influence and inform her career as an organizer and thought leader.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  To be fair, these words were written a few weeks before Anna Julia Cooper’s book was published and before Wells published her first antilynching pamphlet. However, Cooper had been lecturing to wide public acclaim from the mid 1880s forward, and Frances Harper was certainly famous by 1892. On the one hand, Douglass confronted the same problem that Fannie Barrier Williams confronted and addressed in her World’s Fair Speech. There was not yet a public Black women’s leadership class. On the other hand, his choice to parse the word famous in such conservative terms made it impossible for women to meet his strict criteria. In many ways, this foreshadows the meticulous parsing of the term intellectual in the 1960s, which I discuss in chapter four, that was designed to exclude Black women from that designation. Douglass lived in Washington, D.C., with the prominent women who had founded the Colored Women’s League in the spring of that year. He most assuredly knew or knew of Cooper, Terrell, Ella D. Barrier, Hallie Quinn Brown, and others. Yet he deliberately chose not to mention any of them. Laying claim to Douglass as a kind of mentor did, however, create room for Terrell and Wells to share in his leadership inheritance after his death. By placing this discussion in their autobiographies written in the 1930s, these women sought to revise the racial leadership genealogies that favored the Du Bois–Washington dyad at their expense. The discussion of his death in both their memoirs offers an important racial leadership counter-narrative to the race man leadership model that seemed to take firm root after 1895.10 Meddling: A Theory of AgitationIn 1904, a group of Black editors, headed by J. W. E. Bowen, created a Black literary and political magazine called Voice of the Negro. Terrell regularly contributed biographical sketches of prominent race figures and, occasionally, a political essay. She published one of those essays, “The Mission of Meddler,” in August 1905. “Everybody who has tried to advance the interests of the human race by redressing wrongs or by inaugurating reforms has first been called a meddler,” she wrote.11 Yet, she laid out a systematic case for the political necessity of meddling. As both public intellectual work and political theorizing, Terrell’s essay marks an important moment in mapping her own intellectual terrain and her increasing interest in racial agitation as a form of political engagement. The essay—a defense of meddling as a political act—also contains the seeds of comic whimsy and political mischief that sometimes emerge in Terrell’s work. For instance, to those who took issue with meddling on the principle that it would unduly involve them in the affairs of someone else, she wrote, “[T]his definition tickles the selfish old crustaceans to death; for they consider that it absolves them completely from all responsibility for their neighbor’s welfare.”12

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  I showed him a story I was working on, which I hoped to sell to Esquire or The New Yorker for a great deal of money, which would free me of my parents. “But your prose is so mindless,” Lou said. “As in this sentence, when you say, ‘I had no thought in my head,’ I mean, you don’t stop to think at all, do you, Bunny, you just babble. And then the way you dote on your characters. I can’t bear that sort of doting. And this chandelier. The only reason you bother to put it in the story is so that it can come crashing down at the end, which is an absurdly cheap touch. But the worst is the doting, this lip-smacking satisfaction you take in all these dreadful middle-class bores with their problems, as though having a problem were an automatic bid for sympathy instead of an invitation to impatience or contempt.” His words stung me. Every criticism seemed irrefutable if previously unsuspected. It was true I loved my characters, to whom I’d distributed the various voices and vices of my friends. It was true I wrote in a trance and never revised; my mother had told me I was a genius. A genius doesn’t grope, learn, rework, or even work. And it was true I wrote to be adored—by my mother first of all, and then by Lou or whomever I was with. Yes, I wanted fame, and when the heat of vision, fired by Drambuie, was on me in my white room, I felt I was already famous. But there was another reason to write: to redeem the sin of my life by turning it into the virtue of art. Until now, I’d showed my stories only to appreciative readers. Other young writers would ply me with compliments and in exchange I’d praise their work. The usual inspiration for my fiction was the “powerful” television drama with its cozy view of character, its melodramatic plot, and its message. To show that this was literature, however, one threw in a symbol or two, preferably something from the Passion of Christ, and a poetic haze of phrase condensed from our best Southern writers. An epiphany was clapped on to lots and lots of hard-hitting dialogue, which was easy to write, although one pretended otherwise. The characters were all suitably defeated and sensitive.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  In therapy I became so expert in spotting covert games that Dale herself would sometimes ask me for my opinion. Once in a great while someone would notice that I had said nothing about myself for ages, but I was too valuable an ally to alienate. In my mind I was earning chips I’d be able to cash in one wonderful day when I would need everyone’s attention and sympathy. One night over supper with Maria I yawned and said, “Of course Maeve was just playing Yes, But.” “What do you mean?” Maria asked. “That’s one of the games people play,” and I went on to explain it with majestic confidence. Maria put her knife and fork down and grew silent. Without raising her eyes she said, “When I met you, you had one of the sharpest, most open, most skeptical minds I’d ever encountered. Now you’ve become the dullest sort of bigot. You see absolutely every last thing through those ridiculous therapeutic glasses. You’re as smug as a Catholic convert or an American Marxist without enjoying the intellectual range and depth of either system.” “Why do you find my therapy so threatening, Maria?” I asked, already trying to label the game she was playing. “You’re my best friend, Dumpling, but I don’t think I can continue this friendship if you don’t change. I can’t bear to see the wreck you’ve made of your mind. It’s all because you can’t accept being gay, which isn’t such a big deal. You’re still white, a man, handsome, charming, from a well-to-do family, intelligent—everything’s been handed to you, but you—” Keep collecting injustices, I thought, naming one of the games members sometimes played. Maria’s case interested me. I noticed how she was slowly giving up her pro-Russian stand in favor of feminism. Women’s rights. I asked her what earthly rights women lacked. They could already vote, divorce, work. Maria became so angry with me that she had to swallow an extra high-blood-pressure pill. Her voice shaking, she told me how women earned half of what men made for the same work but how they were usually refused the better jobs. “The woman problem is a poverty problem,” she said. “You joke around about whether to say Miss or Ms. , but the real issue is poverty. Most of the poor families in America are headed by single women, usually black.” We ordered brandies. She said, “Do you remember how we used to smile at Buddy and Betts, those two old dykes at Solitaire? We used to think it was so amusing the way Betts played the malade imaginaire . I just got a letter from the colony director telling me that Betts’s malady was hunger. The poor old things didn’t have any money, and Buddy got too old to be the sheriff. They never did have much money. Then Buddy started drinking. Last winter they both froze to death.” Maria’s eyes filled with tears. “Those lovable old eccentrics were starving.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Although Black women have professed and proclaimed intricate, compelling, and important ideas about the state of Black people in the public—since Phillis Wheatley began writing poetry—when the term Black public intellectual is used, only a limited number of people come immediately to mind. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there is Frederick Douglass (but not his mentees, Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells); Booker T. Washington (but not his wife, Margaret Murray Washington); W. E. B. Du Bois (but not his contemporaries, Anna Julia Cooper or Fannie Barrier Williams); E. Franklin Frazier, Martin Luther King (but not their contemporaries, Anna Arnold Hedgeman and Pauli Murray); and Harold Cruse (but not his contemporary, Toni Cade Bambara). The history of Black public intellectualism is a history of race men. I think here of a spate of Black intellectual history texts written over the last decade, which continue to narrate the major ideas that have undergirded the Black freedom struggle through two dominant frames. First, W. E. B. Du Bois predominates as the central intellectual figure of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Second, his supporting cast is always men. Representative texts include Jonathan Holloway’s Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris, Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919–1941, Eben Miller’s Born along the Color Line: The 1933 Amenia Conference and the Rise of a National Civil Rights Movement, and Zachery Williams’s In Search of the Talented Tenth: Howard University Public Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Race, 1926–1970. Despite laudable attempts by both Miller and Williams to substantively include and make clear that Black women shaped the social environs of Black intellectual production in the early twentieth century, these texts simply do not go far enough in disrupting an intellectual history narratively enamored of race men. For instance, while Williams mentions many women that were a part of what he terms the “Howard Public Intellectuals,” he says little about their intellectual contributions, and more about their work challenging sexism and recruiting more women to train at Howard.43 Pauli Murray, a student at Howard during the heyday of Howard’s public intellectual dominance and a key figure under consideration in this book, created the term Jane Crow specifically to respond to the sexist and homophobic forms of intellectual exclusion that she experienced as a law student there. More recently, Martin Kilson’s Transformation of the African American Intelligentsia reveals how deeply entrenched the Du Boisian narrative is to our framing of Black knowledge production. Based on Kilson’s 2012 Du Bois lectures at Harvard, Transformation returns to the Du Bois–Washington debates as the paradigm through which to understand key issues in Black political thought in the twentieth century. Recycling the well-worn framework of Washington, the accommodationist, and Du Bois, the civil rights strategist, Kilson argues that Washington and Du Bois were responsible for “producing two competing leadership methodologies to guide the transformation of twentieth-century African American society.”44

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Tilyou, and so forth…. A hot frankfurter and a cup of steaming hot coffee would do me good, I think. I find a little booth open on a side street off the boardwalk. There is a shooting gallery open a few doors away. Not a customer in sight: the owner is shooting at the clay pigeons himself, for practice, no doubt. A drunken sailor comes lurching along; a few feet away from me he doubles up and lets go. (No need to take note of this.) I go down to the beach and watch the sea gulls. I’m looking at the sea gulls and thinking about Russia. A picture of Tolstoy seated at a bench mending shoes obsesses me. What was the name of his abode again? Yasna Polyana? No, Yasnaya Polyana. Well, anyway, what the hell am I speculating on this for? Wake up! I shake myself and push forward into the icy gale. Driftwood lying all about. Fantastic forms. (So many stories about bottles with messages inside them.) I wish now I had thought to ask MacGregor to come along. That idiotic, pseudo-serious line of his sometimes stimulated me in a perverse way. How he would laugh to see me pacing the beach in search of material! “Well, you’re working anyhow,” I can hear him chirping. “That’s something. But why in hell did you have to pick this for a subject? You know damned well nobody will be interested in it. You probably just wanted a little outing. Now you’ve got a good excuse, haven’t you? Jesus, Henry, you’re just the same as ever—nuts , completely nuts.” As I board the train to go home I realize that I have made just three lines of notes. I haven’t the slightest idea what I shall say when I sit down to the machine. My mind is a blank. A frozen blank. I sit staring out the window and not even the tremor of a thought assails me. The landscape itself is a frozen blank. The whole world is locked in snow and ice, mute, helpless. I’ve never known such a bleak, dismal, gruesome, lacklustre day. That night I went to bed rather chastened and humbled. Doubly so, because before retiring I had picked up a volume of Thomas Mann (in which there was the Tonio Kröger story) and had been overwhelmed by the flawless quality of the narrative. To my astonishment, however, I awoke the next day full of piss and vinegar. Instead of going for my usual morning stroll—“to get my blood up”—I sat down at the machine immediately after breakfast. By noon I had finished my article on Coney Island. It had come without effort. Why? Because instead of forcing it out I had gone to sleep—after due surrender of the ego, certes . It was a lesson in the futility of struggle. Do your utmost and let Providence do the rest! A petty victory, perhaps, but most illuminating. The article, of course, was never accepted.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  For once the radio wasn’t on and no well-bred announcer was reading to us from Pound’s Cantos or playing us alternative interpretations of “Nessun dorma.” People stopped and looked at the books in the window but hurried on. Tex slammed the glass counter and moaned, “Honey-chile, your mother’s in a bad way.” For an instant I imagined my real mother had phoned in an emergency, but then I understood he meant himself. I was flattered that he was about to confide in me. My mother often told me her secrets, and I was an experienced listener. I could look sympathetic and I gave only welcome advice. “Your momma’s done hocked her jewels for her man and now I’s too hard up to buy needles and thread for my notions shop. Oh sweetheart, tell me, who will feed Baby?” Instantly I grasped that this funny, imaginative way of talking was a form of politeness, a way of conveying his distress in general terms without treating me to the unpleasant details. “Are you completely broke?” I asked, though I wanted to ask, “Who is this man?” “All my money is here,” he said, pointing to his glossy books and records. “If she can’t sling this hash, Mom will have to close the diner.” Every time Morris had started to substitute female for male pronouns, Tex had shut him up out of deference to my supposed innocence. Now Tex himself was inverting genders—was it a sign of embarrassment? “Who’s your man?” I asked. He slid off the stool behind the cash register and came over to me on the pink loveseat. His shoulders dropped. He was really very homely, with clammy skin, small boneless hands, a meager sparrow’s torso. When he took off his glasses, his eyes looked huge and wet. “You see, my lovers always turn out to be straight.” I must have looked confused, despite my efforts to appear all-comprehending, for he added, “Heterosexual, normal. My current beau is a cop, Bob, and I just paid three hundred bucks for his wife’s abortion.” “Does she know about you and Bob—what you are?” I asked, not quite sure what they were. How could a bona fide heterosexual like a queer? Tex lit a cigarette. He was strangely likable, despite his melancholy air—likable because he carried his whole story with him wherever he went, like the housekeeper who worked for my father and stepmother, scattering her ash in her tenth cup of coffee, chatting away about the men in her life, still wearing her bathrobe at three in the afternoon, her sympathy universal even when her understanding was partial. As for Tex, he was so intimate that he erased the distance between adolescent and adult. I had heard my mother and her friends discussing the “man problem”; now Tex was doing the same, and I was listening as a provisional equal.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Not only did the separatist rhetoric of Black Power “grate upon [her] sensibilities,” she wrote, but she literally felt that she was “living in a world turned upside down [with] a complete reversal of the goals that had fired her own student activism.” 41 Murray’s narrative of Black female subjectivity and her political allegiances were predicated upon a very particular notion of Negro or Black racial identity, which foregrounded the mixed racial heritage and American values and aspirations of people of color. In this respect, her more assimilationist values found her embracing and reinscribing the politics of respectability for a later generation, rather than resisting it, as she had done earlier. At the bottom of a copy of “Negro Youth’s Dilemma,” Murray mused during her time at Brandeis on her generation’s response to a new generation of discontented youth, wondering what, if anything, they could say to young people when conditions had changed so little. 42 Murray’s classroom at Brandeis—a veritable battleground within the space of the university between two different generational approaches to the Black freedom struggle—serves as an important site for mapping the intellectual geography and genealogy of Black feminist intellectual work. Her student Patricia Hill, whom we know today as Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins, deeply impacted Murray through her rejection of Murray’s outmoded racial conservatism. Murray saw herself within the liberal civil rights traditions, which exemplified the kind of proper, dignified agitation of people like Mary Church Terrell. Patricia Hill represented a new school of thought altogether. For us, the schism between the two women, that is, Hill’s clear rejection of Murray’s race politics, indicate that race women intellectuals did not merely contend with gender politics. They also had differing ideas about racial identity that informed their approaches to combating racism and to the intellectual work of studying Black people. At the same time, this conflict connects in a literal, embodied way the academic origins of Black feminism to the larger project of Black Studies. This battle in Murray’s classroom at Brandeis brings us back to the initial set of concerns that have driven this book. Their battles demonstrate the ways in which the categories of gender and race are imbricated by the institutional state of racial knowledge production. As Murray would come to write just one year later in her essay, “The Liberation of Black Women”: “[R]eading through much of the current literature on the black revolution, one is left with the impression that for all the rhetoric about self-determination, the main thrust of black militancy is a bid of black males to share power with white males in a continuing patriarchal society in which both black and white females are relegated to secondary status.” Though she did not fully articulate her concerns in 1969, by 1970, her later critique made clear the political stakes of the masculinism of the Black Power Movement.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Published in 1964 just one year after the March, Hedgeman’s “memoir of Negro leadership,” Trumpet Sounds, acts as an intervention in a recalcitrant masculinist narrative of racial leadership. The gender politics of the March on Washington demonstrate firsthand the ways in which this symbolic show of the Black freedom struggle was inherently gendered and fraught with Black men’s own investments in dominating the direction of racial leadership. Not only did Hedgeman call the Civil Rights establishment publicly to task, but she also took specific aim at King. She acknowledged that King’s “speech on that day has been reprinted and sent across the world, for all men understand the ‘dream.’”14 As he addressed the crowd, King reminded her of President John F. Kennedy. “Both of these young men,” she wrote, “had somehow seemed to detach themselves from all sense of their own relationship to the past. President Kennedy had done it with his announcement that the younger generation would establish the new frontier and Martin Luther King had seemed to bring the same message with his beautifully poetic description of his dream.” Inscribed in her own words on her program from JFK’s inauguration, she had written “Dear Mr. Kennedy, your dream of a new frontier is bound up in the dreams of all men who have had a vision beyond the moment; a vision of some men in the world sense the beginning of time.” She “wanted desperately to say these same words to Martin Luther King, standing in front of 250,000 people who had come to Washington because they had a dream.” “In the face of all the men and women of the past who have dreamed in vain, I wished very much that Martin had said, ‘We have a dream.’”15 Acutely aware of the multigenerational nature of the Black freedom struggle, Hedgeman pointed to the ways that the politics of King’s dream were predicated on an active erasure of long histories of collective Black dissent. While the March on Washington has come to symbolize the moment when King donned his role as official “charismatic leader” of the Black freedom struggle, Hedgeman was neither swayed nor seduced by his charismatic masculinism. Erica Edwards powerfully argues that [c]harisma is founded in three forms of violence: the historical or historiographical violence of reducing a heterogeneous Black freedom struggle to a top-down narrative of Great Man leadership; the social violence of performing social change in the form of a fundamentally antidemocratic form of authority; and the epistemological violence of structuring knowledge of Black political subjectivity and movement within a gendered hierarchy of political value that grants uninterrogated power to normative masculinity.16

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  In many ways, though, Black women who hoped to fulfill the ambitious intellectual projects she laid out were beginning again. Fannie Barrier Williams, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, and Victoria Earle Matthews had been calling for racial knowledge production about Black women since 1893. Over three-quarters of a century later, however, Black women still were not seen as experts on their own social condition, and, indeed, if Ebony is to be believed, not capable of any appreciable expertise at all. Bambara’s list of items of study, however, did offer a set of priorities for Black and women-of-color feminisms that have been taken up across a range of disciplines at the present date. The priorities she laid out continue to inform new avenues of study within the broader fields of Black feminism and Black Studies. Black Woman did effectively take up the charge from Pierce’s Ebony article to lay out a “new definition of Black femininity.” So, for instance, in Bambara’s oft-cited essay “On the Issue of Roles,” she faced head-on the question of “the Black woman’s Role in the Revolution,” by questioning both the binary definitions of masculine and feminine and offering up her own structural account of Black gender categories. Calling stereotypical notions of masculine and feminine “a lot of merchandising nonsense,” Bambara argued that gender binaries militated against “what revolution for self is all about—the whole person.” These questions about the relations of gendered identities to revolutionary politics implicated each other, for “the usual notion of sexual differentiation in roles is an obstacle to political consciousness, [because] the way those terms are generally defined and acted upon in this part of the world is a hindrance to full development. And that is a shame, for a revolutionary must be capable of, above all, total self-autonomy.”57

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  There is some indication that porn has a liberalizing effect: heterosexual male users, for instance, are more likely than peers to approve of same-sex marriage. On the other hand, they’re also less likely to support affirmative action for women. Among teenage boys, regular porn use has been correlated with seeing sex as purely physical and regarding girls as “play things.” Porn users are also more likely than their peers to measure their masculinity, social status, and self-worth by their ability to score with “hot” women (which may explain that disproportionate pressure girls report to text boys naked photos of themselves as well as the plots of most Seth Rogen films). Male and female college students who report recent porn use have been repeatedly found to be more likely than others to believe “rape myths”: that only strangers commit sexual assault or that the victim “asked for it” by drinking too much or wearing “slutty” clothing or by going to a club alone. Perhaps because it depicts aggression as sexy, porn also seems to desensitize women to potential violence: female porn users are less likely than others to intervene when seeing another woman being threatened or assaulted and are slower to recognize when they’re in danger themselves. Boys (both in high school and college), not surprisingly, use porn more regularly than girls. Slightly less than half of male college students use it weekly; only 3 percent of females do. Given that frequent consumers of porn are more likely to consider its depictions of sex realistic, this can skew expectations in the bedroom. “I do think porn changes how guys view sex,” mused Alyson Lee. “Especially with my first boyfriend. He had no experience. He thought it would happen like in porn, that I’d be ready a lot faster and he could just, you know, pound.” “They think they’re supposed to do this hammer-in-and-out thing and that’s what girls like,” agreed a sophomore at a California college. “They don’t realize, ‘Dude, that does not feel good.’ It’s all they know. It’s what they see. If you’re just hooking up with someone, like a one-time thing or whatever, you just pretend it feels good.”