Shame

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 Little Women (1868)

  He did not do much, but he thought a great deal and was conscious of a change of some sort going on in spite of himself. "It's genius simmering, perhaps. I'll let it simmer, and see what comes of it," he said, with a secret suspicion all the while that it wasn't genius, but something far more common. Whatever it was, it simmered to some purpose, for he grew more and more discontented with his desultory life, began to long for some real and earnest work to go at, soul and body, and finally came to the wise conclusion that everyone who loved music was not a composer. Returning from one of Mozart's grand operas, splendidly performed at the Royal Theatre, he looked over his own, played a few of the best parts, sat staring at the busts of Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and Bach, who stared benignly back again. Then suddenly he tore up his music sheets, one by one, and as the last fluttered out of his hand, he said soberly to himself... "She is right! Talent isn't genius, and you can't make it so. That music has taken the vanity out of me as Rome took it out of her, and I won't be a humbug any longer. Now what shall I do?" That seemed a hard question to answer, and Laurie began to wish he had to work for his daily bread. Now if ever, occurred an eligible opportunity for 'going to the devil', as he once forcibly expressed it, for he had plenty of money and nothing to do, and Satan is proverbially fond of providing employment for full and idle hands. The poor fellow had temptations enough from without and from within, but he withstood them pretty well, for much as he valued liberty, he valued good faith and confidence more, so his promise to his grandfather, and his desire to be able to look honestly into the eyes of the women who loved him, and say "All's well," kept him safe and steady. Very likely some Mrs. Grundy will observe, "I don't believe it, boys will be boys, young men must sow their wild oats, and women must not expect miracles." I dare say you don't, Mrs. Grundy, but it's true nevertheless. Women work a good many miracles, and I have a persuasion that they may perform even that of raising the standard of manhood by refusing to echo such sayings. Let the boys be boys, the longer the better, and let the young men sow their wild oats if they must. But mothers, sisters, and friends may help to make the crop a small one, and keep many tares from spoiling the harvest, by believing, and showing that they believe, in the possibility of loyalty to the virtues which make men manliest in good women's eyes.

• From The Ultimate Guide to Orgasm for Women: How to Become Orgasmic for a Lifetime (2011)

  “I really need help,” the email read. “I feel like a great big loser of a woman because I can’t have an orgasm.” Arriving in my inbox from a total stranger, the long email detailed a personal struggle with a very private issue, one she had not shared with anyone. But she shared it with me, and she was not the first, or the only one. Not being able to have an orgasm, or what she thought was the right kind of orgasm, had pushed her to the point of desperation, made her feel frighteningly alone, like she was a “loser,” that she had somehow let down the sisterhood of all women, and that not only was she doing something wrong, but that she was also likely broken in some way that could never be fixed. Like my email advice seeker, who signed off “Frustrated in Seattle,” many women have a lot riding on orgasm. It goes deeper than self-esteem. It gets to the very heart of what makes many of us feel like women. It validates our personhood in our gender and our bodies. It’s something that represents our power, our true ownership of our bodies. Take this away, or make it feel unattainable or wrong, and you take from a woman one of the things that is truly hers. Withhold it, and we somehow feel like we’re not complete. I think you know what I mean. Growing up, I always had this nagging feeling in the back of my mind that there was some orgasm “ideal” that I was not attaining, or should be very, very worried I would not be able to have. While my experience was not as frustrating as “Frustrated,” I knew I was able to have them—by myself. But for some weird reason, I believed that the only “real” way for me to have one was to have it with a partner, and from penis-vagina penetration. Until I read the first edition of Mikaya Heart’s book years ago, I had no idea how this notion had entered my brain. Nor especially how something so absolute and so negative and so personal had taken root so firmly. I don’t remember anyone telling me as a young woman that any kind of orgasm was any more valid than another. Or that I would be incomplete if I did not come in a certain way, with a guy. Yet for some reason I really felt that way, and it wasn’t until I started to ask myself where this idea came from that I realized that it was not a value of my own. It was someone else’s. Let me confess right now that I didn’t know how, where, or when I had allowed my orgasms to be defined (or validated) by someone else. They just were.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  As to his descent from the white Lea family of North Carolina, Haley completely invented a villainous cracker character named Tom Lea, who raped Kunta Kinte’s daughter, Kizzy (Haley’s alleged direct ancestor), and betrayed his own mulatto son, “Chicken George,” by selling off his family. This could not have occurred, because the historical Thomas Lea was already dead by that time. And Lea was not in fact Haley’s “po’ cracker,” but a prosperous landowner with sixteen thousand acres and numerous slaves; some of his relatives held prestigious political offices. The class element in Roots was, in this way, as wrong on the American side as on the African. Nor was there a shred of evidence that Haley’s lost Gambian ancestors were of an elite bloodline, and Toby/Kunte Kinte a breed and a class above the African American field hands who did the most backbreaking labor in the U.S. South. Yet for Haley, Kunta Kinte in America had to be fashioned as a man who honored the memory of his proud African ancestors; and in spite of his enslaved condition, he and his family had to set themselves apart from their low- class cracker relatives. 6 Let us be clear, then. Besides being a fabrication of his family’s history, Haley’s book applied a kind of logic that was downright conservative. He construed himself as one of an African nobility, and he held that ancestry said a lot about what a person could become—and pass on. Roots was too good to be true, which was why Haley, who pitched his story to the networks before he had even written it, was eventually exposed as a hoaxer and a hustler. 7 Haley’s Roots demonstrated how easy it was to invent a pedigree. Fictional family trees were all the rage. James A. Michener, arguably the most popular of twentieth-century historical fiction writers, produced a primarily white version of Roots in his novel Chesapeake (1978). Michener followed several families of varying class backgrounds and tied their destinies to a landscape dotted with geese and blue herons. The white trash lineage he covers originates with one Timothy Turlock, whom Michener describes as “small, quick, sly, dirty of dress and habit,” and the father of “six bastards.” After an undistinguished life in England, Turlock was unceremoniously dumped on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in the 1600s, and lived in a swamp. 8 Multiple generations later, little had changed for the Turlock clan. Amos Turlock was a toothless crank living in a trailer in the 1970s. As one reviewer put it, “feral marshlanders” anchored the entire narrative. The Turlocks remained one with their terrain. Amos surrounded his trailer with tacky statuary of Santa and the Seven Dwarfs; he derived the greatest pleasure in finding his way around

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  • • • It would take the Tennessean James Agee to probe the meaning of “poor white” on a truly meaningful level. In his powerfully drawn, enduringly evocative Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), Agee attempted to toss the source of the white trash fetish back onto the middle class. The unusual book included the chaste still life–style photographs of Walker Evans, and addressed what Odum’s slow-to-change cohort refused to do: interrogate how an interpreter imposed his values on the subject. There could be no such thing as objective journalism. Agee opened the book by wondering out loud how a Harvard-educated, middle-class man like himself could write about poor whites without turning them into objects of pity or disgust. He did not want to be a mere gawker. How could he “pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings, an ignorant and helpless rural family, for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings, in the name of science, of ‘honest journalism’”? Was it possible to convey the “cruel radiance of what is”? Probably not. 57 So Agee experimented with different strategies, offering detailed descriptions of material objects: shoes, overalls, the sparse arrangement of furnishings in the tenant's home. With a meticulous attention to detail, he tried in words to imitate the camera’s “ice-cold” vision. In another of his departures from conventional reporting, he interspersed what he imagined were the unspoken thoughts of the poor tenant with the uncensored insults he had heard from the landlord. Inside the mind of the tenant, he voiced disbelief: how did he get “trapped,” how did he become “beyond help, beyond hope”? He gave his subjects real feelings, descriptive laments. The landlord’s cruelty comes through his laughter over Agee’s enjoyment of the tenants’ “home cooking.” The landlord curses a poor cropper as a “dirty son-of-a-bitch” who had bragged that he hadn’t bought his family a bar of soap in five years. A woman in one of the tenant families was, in the landlord’s words, the “worst whore” in this part of this country—second only to her mother. The whole bunch were, to the owner, “the lowest trash you can find.” 58 There was a method to Agee’s madness. In this strangely introspective, deeply disturbing narrative, the author tries to force readers to look beyond conventional ways of seeing the poor. Instead of blaming them, he asks his audience to acknowledge their own complicity. The poor are not dull or slow-

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  I WAS A liar. Even though I lived in a place where everyone knew who I was, I couldn't help but try to introduce new versions of myself as my interests changed, and as other versions failed to persuade. I was also a thief. Dwight's reason for calling me one was trivial, based on my having taken his hunting knife without permission. My thefts were real. I'd begun by stealing candy from the rooms of newspaper subscribers who lived in the bachelors' quarters. Most of these men kept candy around. I fell into the habit of taking a piece here, a piece there. Then I stole money from them. At first I took only small change, to buy Cokes and ice cream, but later I stole fifty-cent pieces and even dollar bills. I stashed the money in an ammunition box under one of the barracks. My idea was to steal enough to run away. I was ready to do anything to get clear of Dwight. I even thought of killing him, shooting him down some night while he was picking on my mother. I not only carried newspapers, I read them, and reading them had taught me that you can kill a man and get away with it. You just had to appear in the right role, like Cheryl Crane when she stabbed Johnny Stampanato to death for threatening Lana Turner.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  "How do you steal?" "I steal money, Father. From my mother's purse when she's in the shower." "How long have you been doing this?" I didn't answer. "Well?" he said. "A week? A year? Two years?" I chose the one in the middle. "A year." "A year," he repeated. "That won't do. You have to stop. Do you intend to stop?" "Yes, Father." "Honestly, now." "Honestly, Father." "All right. Good. What else?" "I'm a backbiter." "A backbiter?" "I say things about my friends when they're not around." "That won't do either," he said. "No, Father." "That certainly won't do. Your friends will desert you if you persist in this and let me tell you, a life without friends is no life at all." "Yes, Father." "Do you sincerely intend to stop?" "Yes, Father." "Good. Be sure that you do. I tell you this in all seriousness. Anything else?" "I have bad thoughts, Father." "Yes. Well," he said, "why don't we save those for next time. You have enough to work on." The priest gave me my penance and absolved me. As I left the confessional I heard his own door open and close. Sister James came forward to meet me again, and we waited together as the priest made his way to where we stood. Breathing hoarsely, he steadied himself against a pillar. He laid his other hand on my shoulder. "That was fine," he said. "Just fine." He gave my shoulder a squeeze. "You have a fine boy here, Sister James." She smiled. "So I do, Father. So I do."

• From Real Sex for Real Women (2008)

  Jasmine said she simply didn’t enjoy oral sex: “It’s the only sexual thing I don’t like. It’s just a personal thing, like preferring chocolate ice cream to vanilla.” Although I didn’t want Jasmine to feel pressured, I asked her what, specifically, she found unappealing about oral sex. “Everything—the smell, the taste… I don’t want anyone that close to me down there, and I don’t feel happy being that close to someone else. Oral sex makes me feel dirty.” Despite being raised in a strict religious household, Jasmine said that she had been a “bad” teenager. She lost her virginity at 13 and had a reputation for being promiscuous. When she left home to go to college she tried to reinvent herself as a “good girl.” Although she felt she had succeeded in this, she still feels guilty about her past, and is eager to distance herself from anything she considers “dirty.” Jasmine also said she was ashamed of her genitals and referred to them only as “down there.”

• From The Girls (2016)

  While I washed my hands, drying them with a stiff towel, I studied myself in the mirror over the sink. For a moment, I tried to see myself through the eyes of the girl with the black hair, or even the boy in the cowboy hat, studying my features for a vibration under the skin. The effort was visible in my face, and I felt ashamed. No wonder the boy had seemed disgusted: he must have seen the longing in me. Seen how my face was blatant with need, like an orphan’s empty dish. And that was the difference between me and the black-haired girl—her face answered all its own questions. I didn’t want to know these things about myself. I splashed water on my face, cold water, like Connie had once told me to do. “Cold water makes your pores close up,” and maybe it was true: I felt my skin tighten, water dripping down my face and neck.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  My back stiffened terribly during the flight, and by the time I made it to Grand Central to catch a train to my friends' place upstate, my body was rippling with pain. Over the past few months, I'd had back spasms of varying ferocity, from simple ignorable pain, to pain that made me forsake speech to grind my teeth, to pain so severe I curled up on the floor, screaming. This pain was toward the more severe end of the spectrum. I lay down on a hard bench in the waiting area, feeling my back muscles contort, breathing to control the pain—the ibuprofen wasn't touching this—and naming each muscle as it spasmed to stave off tears: erector spinae, rhomboid, latissimus, piriformis… A security guard approached. "Sir, you can't lie down here." "I'm sorry," I said, gasping out the words. "Bad…back…spasms." "You still can't lie down here." *I'm sorry, but I'm dying from cancer.* The words lingered on my tongue—but what if I wasn't?

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  I have told this story many times, not out of bravado, but out of a need for absolution. I have never been a violent person. Even when I was young and adopted the rules of the street, anyone who knew me knew it was a bad fit. I’ve never felt the pride that is supposed to come with righteous self-defense and justified violence. Whenever it was me on top of someone, whatever my rage in the moment, afterward I always felt sick at having been lowered to the crudest form of communication. Malcolm made sense to me not out of a love of violence but because nothing in my life prepared me to understand tear gas as deliverance, as those Black History Month martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement did. But more than any shame I feel about my own actual violence, my greatest regret was that in seeking to defend you I was, in fact, endangering you. “I could have you arrested,” he said. Which is to say, “One of your son’s earliest memories will be watching the men who sodomized Abner Louima and choked Anthony Baez cuff, club, tase, and break you.” I had forgotten the rules, an error as dangerous on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as on the Westside of Baltimore. One must be without error out here. Walk in single file. Work quietly. Pack an extra number 2 pencil. Make no mistakes. But you are human and you will make mistakes. You will misjudge. You will yell. You will drink too much. You will hang out with people you shouldn’t. Not all of us can always be Jackie Robinson—not even Jackie Robinson was always Jackie Robinson. But the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined—with Eric Garner’s anger, with Trayvon Martin’s mythical words (“You are gonna die tonight”), with Sean Bell’s mistake of running with the wrong crowd, with me standing too close to the small-eyed boy pulling out. A society, almost necessarily, begins every success story with the chapter that most advantages itself, and in America, these precipitating chapters are almost always rendered as the singular action of exceptional individuals. “It only takes one person to make a change,” you are often told. This is also a myth. Perhaps one person can make a change, but not the kind of change that would raise your body to equality with your countrymen.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  witted, he insists; they have merely internalized a kind of “anesthesia,” which numbs them against the “shame and insult of discomforts, insecurities, and inferiorities.” The southern middle class deserves the greater portion of shame, and especially those who excused their own callous indifference with the line, “They are ‘used’ to it.” 59 Despite its subsequent literary success, Agee’s unsettling text reached few readers in 1941. For its part, Odum’s work came under attack for speaking above (rather than to) the poor tenant farmer. One of Odum’s most outspoken critics was the Vanderbilt University English professor and poet Donald Davidson, who was also hostile to the TVA, which he saw as evidence of northern meddling. As one of the contributors to I’ll Take My Stand, Davidson defended the old agrarian ideal of the South. He dared to praise the Ku Klux Klan for defeating the “detestable” northern missionaries of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and his only regret was that the KKK could not prevent the rise of the “more subtle utopians” of the New South (by which he meant Odum and his University of North Carolina crowd). The scholarly “southern regionalists” could never unify the South, Davidson declared. Odum’s “indices” could not be translated into the “language of the ‘ignorant man.’” What remained was an apparent paradox: Was it only the sectional demagogue who would ever be able to co-opt the poor in the South? Even if an Agee or an Odum momentarily captured the “cruel radiance of what is,” wasn’t it obvious that the poor whites they wished to free weren’t listening? That was what Davidson believed. 60 Somewhere between the writing styles of Agee and Odum was a new kind of southern writer. Jonathan Daniels’s A Southerner Discovers the South (1938) not only made the bestseller list, but also won over Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Here was a North Carolina journalist with an eye for irony. He avoided the density of Odum’s encyclopedic study, and he steered clear of the sleepy pastoralism of the southern agrarian. With nary a hint of defensiveness, he traveled thousands of miles through the South and let the people he met talk for themselves. 61 Daniels found evidence that disproved Davidson’s critique of Howard Odum when he happened on a small-town lawyer who owned and cherished all of the sociologist’s books. He visited the famous Providence Canyon, a 150-foot-deep Georgia gully, which became a strange monument to soil erosion and a natural wonder. He attacked the South’s prison mentality, the idea that generation after generation of manual laborers should accept their exploitation as natural. At Cannon Mills, in North Carolina, he noted the cyclone fences that turned mills

• From Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023)

  Years ago, I was in bed with a man who hired me, and it became clear he wanted to have unprotected sex. He rubbed against me, murmuring deflections to my suggestion that he get up and get a condom, as I physically but nearly imperceptibly resisted, still kissing him as I lightly pressed my thighs together, angling myself, ever softly, away. I wasn’t scared, though he was over me, and much stronger than me, and I did not know him at all save for his legal name and his place of employment. He didn’t seem like the type of man who would actually rape me, just the type of man who would push his luck. When I finally became concerned that he would soon push inside of me despite my increasingly clear physical cues not to, I spoke. I explained plainly that we would not be having sex without a condom but that I’d be happy to do something else. He protested mildly—“Even if I don’t come inside of you?”—and then relented, retrieving protection. At the time, I found this experience interesting: a way to think about power dynamics as they relate to client and hooker, men and women, having sex with strangers. Why hadn’t I felt threatened, and why hadn’t I asserted myself earlier? I wondered, with the forced intellectual remove of an anthropologist. Months afterward, it dawned on me: enduring a man’s efforts to push my boundaries is commonplace and boring, just like working to live. But taking pains to find such violations interesting, as opposed to alarming or disappointing, gives us a way to live within them more easily, letting them linger in only certain parts of the mind. The same is true of confessional writing. Bowing to the creative moment that I’m both willingly and forcibly part of makes it bearable, livable. Performing intimacy is also work I know how to do: the studied reveal is the specialty of the whore. Guy Debord writes, “The spectacle is the stage at which the commodity has succeeded in totally colonizing social life. Commodification is not only visible, we no longer see anything else; the world we see is the world of the commodity.” Our desires are not our own; what we find worthwhile does not come from ourselves. In Stepford Wives, the lobotomized, robot-ized women serve as ATMs as well as housewives. When I open my mouth, I wish money would come out. Tiqqun writes, “The appalling thing isn’t that the Young-Girl is fundamentally a whore, but that she refuses to perceive herself as such.” Well, here I am!

• From Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023)

  Legibility requires an audience; legible simply means decipherable, begging the question of what, exactly, it was that was deciphered. In art, as in sex work, legibility is often shrouded and unstable, constantly in question, emerging from a delicate scaffolding of intention, guesswork, clues, context. What is formally indistinguishable from porn, or dating app photos, or ad photos, is made legible as art because of where it is shown and who sees it and how pointedly they interpret it, and vice versa. Images are translated by their viewers and critics, to profound legal, social, and financial consequence: the art writer, the border patrol agent, the lonely traveler, the would-be buyer, the person on the other end of the phone. ~ In his famed 1972 performance art piece Seedbed, Vito Acconci masturbated while hidden underneath a foot-ramp in a SoHo gallery. Acconci’s work was widely considered to be narcissistic, so much so that he later lamented, “Seedbed might have made my career, but it also destroyed it.” Acconci’s own protocol describes the piece this way: Half-way across the room, the floor becomes a ramp that rises gradually to a height of two and a half feet at the far wall. Each day, the piece is open, from 10 A.M. to 6 P.M.: I’m underneath the ramp, moving under the viewers’ floor—I’m masturbating, I keep my masturbation going by building sexual fantasies on the footsteps above me. The viewer enters the clean white space; the viewer hears a voice from below. Photographs of the exhibit are strange: the room is barren, the walls white, with the floor sloping upward. Photographs of Acconci beneath the ramp are even stranger: the structure appears haphazard, with small supportive beams jutting between floor and ramp at odd angles, Acconci curled among them, jerking off in a fetal position. It looks claustrophobic. As visitors walked and sat above him, they heard his voice saying things like “I’m pressing my eyes into your hair.” In a 1991 interview, Richard Prince asked Acconci, “Did you really ever have an orgasm under the Seedbed?” “Yes,” he answered, and it’s not hard to imagine how. His positioning is abject, humiliating—one of the great aphrodisiacs. But asked a similar question in 2007—“Could you find it sexy?”—he clarified, “It was more of a performance. It was like, this is my job, this is what I have to do.”

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  My fellow resident Jeff and I worked traumas together. When he called me down to the trauma bay because of a concurrent head injury, we were always in sync. He’d assess the abdomen, then ask for my prognosis on a patient’s cognitive function. “Well, he could still be a senator,” I once replied, “but only from a small state.” Jeff laughed, and from that moment on, state population became our barometer for head-injury severity. “Is he a Wyoming or a California?” Jeff would ask, trying to determine how intensive his care plan should be. Or I’d say, “Jeff, I know his blood pressure is labile, but I gotta get him to the OR or he’s gonna go from Washington to Idaho—can you get him stabilized?” In the cafeteria one day, as I was grabbing my typical lunch—a Diet Coke and an ice cream sandwich—my pager announced an incoming major trauma. I ran to the trauma bay, tucking my ice cream sandwich behind a computer just as the paramedics arrived, pushing the gurney, reciting the details: “Twenty-two-year-old male, motorcycle accident, forty miles per hour, possible brain coming out his nose…” I went straight to work, calling for an intubation tray, assessing his other vital functions. Once he was safely intubated, I surveyed his various injuries: the bruised face, the road rash, the dilated pupils. We pumped him full of mannitol to reduce brain swelling and rushed him to the scanner: a shattered skull, heavy diffuse bleeding. In my mind, I was already planning the scalp incision, how I’d drill the bone, evacuate the blood. His blood pressure suddenly dropped. We rushed him back to the trauma bay, and just as the rest of the trauma team arrived, his heart stopped. A whirlwind of activity surrounded him: catheters were slipped into his femoral arteries, tubes shoved deep into his chest, drugs pushed into his IVs, and all the while, fists pounded on his heart to keep the blood flowing. After thirty minutes, we let him finish dying. With that kind of head injury, we all murmured in agreement, death was to be preferred. I slipped out of the trauma bay just as the family was brought in to view the body. Then I remembered: my Diet Coke, my ice cream sandwich…and the sweltering heat of the trauma bay. With one of the ER residents covering for me, I slipped back in, ghostlike, to save the ice cream sandwich in front of the corpse of the son I could not. Thirty minutes in the freezer resuscitated the sandwich. Pretty tasty, I thought, picking chocolate chips out of my teeth as the family said its last goodbyes. I wondered if, in my brief time as a physician, I had made more moral slides than strides.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  The fact of history is that black people have not—probably no people have ever—liberated themselves strictly through their own efforts. In every great change in the lives of African Americans we see the hand of events that were beyond our individual control, events that were not unalloyed goods. You cannot disconnect our emancipation in the Northern colonies from the blood spilled in the Revolutionary War, any more than you can disconnect our emancipation from slavery in the South from the charnel houses of the Civil War, any more than you can disconnect our emancipation from Jim Crow from the genocides of the Second World War. History is not solely in our hands. And still you are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life. I am ashamed of how I acted that day, ashamed of endangering your body. But I am not ashamed because I am a bad father, a bad individual or ill mannered. I am ashamed that I made an error, knowing that our errors always cost us more. This is the import of the history all around us, though very few people like to think about it. Had I informed this woman that when she pushed my son, she was acting according to a tradition that held black bodies as lesser, her response would likely have been, “I am not a racist.” Or maybe not. But my experience in this world has been that the people who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration. And the word racist, to them, conjures, if not a tobacco-spitting oaf, then something just as fantastic—an orc, troll, or gorgon. “I’m not a racist,” an entertainer once insisted after being filmed repeatedly yelling at a heckler: “He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger!” Considering segregationist senator Strom Thurmond, Richard Nixon concluded, “Strom is no racist.” There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally. In the era of mass lynching, it was so difficult to find who, specifically, served as executioner that such deaths were often reported by the press as having happened “at the hands of persons unknown.” In 1957, the white residents of Levittown, Pennsylvania, argued for their right to keep their town segregated. “As moral, religious and law-abiding citizens.” the group wrote, “we feel that we are unprejudiced and undiscriminating in our wish to keep our community a closed community.” This was the attempt to commit a shameful act while escaping all sanction, and I raise it to show you that there was no golden era when evildoers did their business and loudly proclaimed it as such.

• From Little Women (1868)

  The words, "Fred is a good fellow, but not at all the man I fancied you would ever like," and Laurie's face when he uttered them, kept returning to her as pertinaciously as her own did when she said in look, if not in words, "I shall marry for money." It troubled her to remember that now, she wished she could take it back, it sounded so unwomanly. She didn't want Laurie to think her a heartless, worldly creature. She didn't care to be a queen of society now half so much as she did to be a lovable woman. She was so glad he didn't hate her for the dreadful things she said, but took them so beautifully and was kinder than ever. His letters were such a comfort, for the home letters were very irregular and not half so satisfactory as his when they did come. It was not only a pleasure, but a duty to answer them, for the poor fellow was forlorn, and needed petting, since Jo persisted in being stonyhearted. She ought to have made an effort and tried to love him. It couldn't be very hard, many people would be proud and glad to have such a dear boy care for them. But Jo never would act like other girls, so there was nothing to do but be very kind and treat him like a brother. If all brothers were treated as well as Laurie was at this period, they would be a much happier race of beings than they are. Amy never lectured now. She asked his opinion on all subjects, she was interested in everything he did, made charming little presents for him, and sent him two letters a week, full of lively gossip, sisterly confidences, and captivating sketches of the lovely scenes about her. As few brothers are complimented by having their letters carried about in their sister's pockets, read and reread diligently, cried over when short, kissed when long, and treasured carefully, we will not hint that Amy did any of these fond and foolish things. But she certainly did grow a little pale and pensive that spring, lost much of her relish for society, and went out sketching alone a good deal. She never had much to show when she came home, but was studying nature, I dare say, while she sat for hours, with her hands folded, on the terrace at Valrosa, or absently sketched any fancy that occurred to her, a stalwart knight carved on a tomb, a young man asleep in the grass, with his hat over his eyes, or a curly haired girl in gorgeous array, promenading down a ballroom on the arm of a tall gentleman, both faces being left a blur according to the last fashion in art, which was safe but not altogether satisfactory.

• From Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023)

  Reviewing the piece in 1980, Germano Celant wrote, “All art is pornography if it assumes the right to impose on others personal pleasures and ideas. It is at this philosophic moment that Acconci removes himself from the scene and goes into exile; he intuits that the artist is an obscene exhibitionist who enjoys himself by entrapping others.” Perhaps Acconci is equal opportunity with his entrapment: he traps the viewer into participating, but only after he ensnares himself, caught within an underground web of his own making. In her 1972 review of the work, April Kingsley asked, “How intimate or self-revelatory can art be, and still be art and not life?” Asked by Prince what he found pornographic, Acconci answered, “A conversation in which a man keeps touching a woman’s arm, a man on the street looking back at a woman who’s just walked by; a man kissing goodbye a woman he’s just met … and probably a woman doing the same. I don’t know if these things are pornographic, but they’re probably obscene.” What Acconci describes as pornographic are largely boundary violations. Prince doesn’t ask him if he considers his own work pornographic, but he does ask if he’s ever wanted to create something “but thought, ‘Even I couldn’t get away with that?’” to which Acconci elides the adult entirely: “There have been pieces I didn’t know how to do, so I never worked them out far enough to put out. In the early days, there was an idea of some performance on a floor filled with babies.” Perverse; genius. Last night, I dreamed that I performed a masturbation piece at MoMA. I was in a lobby of some kind, with a cot and a Hitachi magic wand. A gallerist organized the performance for me; it was as though we were renting a booth at a museum, as though museums were like barber shops, or commercial art fairs. A famous lesbian painter visited the installation and offered tacit approval. After everyone walked around, photographing and inspecting the set-up, I got in position to perform, half covering myself with a blanket. At some point the floors caved in and we all fell onto subway tracks filled with several feet of water as the museum’s foundation gave way. Amid the rush of water, I approached my gallerist: “I don’t know why I’m doing this performance for free,” I told her. “What is the point? Can I charge people $100 if they want to watch me, and then take them to a private room? Even the bathroom would be fine.” She mulled it over, said she’d ask the museum.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  After the beating was over and the berating stopped, though, it was easy. I just turned off the flow of tears and stared out the window. Or I went back to reading a Baby-Sitters Club book. I put it all behind me and moved on. Once, after a severe beating, I had a harder time—my breath came in quick hiccups and I couldn't slow it down enough to get air into my lungs. In retrospect, this was probably a panic attack. But I remember watching myself with a strange bemusement. This is so weird, I thought. What's happening? How funny! But what was I supposed to do with those feelings? Catalog them? Sit there thinking about them all day long? Tell them to my mommy and expect sympathy? Please. My feelings didn't matter. They were pointless.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  John Steinbeck, the famed author of The Grapes of Wrath, wrote one of the most revealing appraisals of Clement’s keynote address. He adjudged that the governor had a future, whether it was in “statesmanship or musical comedy”; he saw the Democrat as part “old country boy” and part Elvis, with a dash of Billy Graham and Liberace as well. As Steinbeck put it, Clement’s voice had the “frayed piercing painfulness of a square dance fiddle,” and “in his most impassioned and rehearsed moments, . . . a refined bump and grind.” While the author thought Clement would shake up the party in a good way, at the same time he was suggesting that the “corn-shucker” style was a regional taste that might not be so easily cultivated elsewhere. 74 Steinbeck identified the crux of the southern politician problem: was the governor merely a rabble-rousing entertainer, or could he truly speak for the whole nation? Reflecting on his bright moment from the perspective of 1964, Clement said he knew that people were cheering his speech, but he was just as sure that some in the audience were laughing at him. That year, the Texan Horace Busby, a special assistant to President Johnson, told Bill Moyers that LBJ, with his southern drawl, should in effect be the anti-Clement when he delivered his nomination acceptance speech. “Forensics should be modern, untinged with an old fashioned style,” Busby said. “Alliteration should be minimized.” 75 The Tennessee governor with the Elvis-like movements did not win the vice presidential nomination in 1956. Second place on the ticket went instead to Senator Estes Kefauver, another Tennessean, but one who expressed a somewhat softer hillbilly persona—after all, he had earned a Yale degree. Back in 1948, Kefauver had worn a coonskin cap when he ran for office, after his opponent called him a sneaky “pet coon” who was flirting with communism. In 1956, Kefauver was meant to add to the presidential ticket what one reporter aptly referred to as the “calculated common touch”—the point being that there was nothing authentic about Kefauver’s pose. He was a “spurious hillbilly,” a cheap ploy to offset presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson’s lack of popular appeal. The Illinoisan was called an “egghead,” a bore. Stevenson and Kefauver lost, of course. 76 Meanwhile, Clement hosted Elvis at the governor’s mansion, and in 1958 did the performer a good turn by speaking before a Senate Communications committee in defense of hillbilly music and rock and roll. Vance Packard, author of the bestselling Hidden Persuaders, was testifying before the committee, insisting that mountain music was polluting the national taste. An outraged

• From Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023)

  Schneemann both resents and appreciates the fervor surrounding Site; initially, Morris’s performance eclipsed her own performances and films, which often dealt with, from her perspective, her own naked body’s involvement in the labor of art-making. Her work was derided as both too pornographic, the nudity gratuitous—as in her 1963 series Eye Body, in which she photographed herself nude, painted, with props, to which critics said, “If you want to paint, put your clothes back on”—and not pornographic enough—as in the 1969 screening of her revelatory sex film Fuses, which, according to the New York Times, disappointed “male critics” who hoped it would be more hardcore. Fuses captured Schneemann and her partner, James Tenney, having sex in their bed in the home they shared, from the point of view of their cat, Kitch, shot over a period of “a year or two.” Schneemann said of her intention behind making the piece, “I needed to see if I could re-proportion the structures that were being given to me as hierarchical aesthetic factors. Pop art produced mechanized female bodies and I wanted to show something different from that deadness and slickness.” At the time, the aesthetic hierarchy ranked work made by men using naked women’s bodies significantly higher than work made by women using those same bodies. The women’s work was lesser, in no small part because women artists were so maligned in the industry, period. Schneemann said she’d “been told from the earliest times that [painting] was pointless and that I should stop. At Bard my best painting professor said, ‘Don’t set your heart on art, you’re only a girl.’” Bryan-Wilson writes that Site’s “display of female flesh alongside Morris’s heavy lifting … puts into dialogue sex work and artistic process … propos[ing] both its artists … as laborers, even as Schneemann’s only work is to appear as an object.” Indeed, Morris’s Site brought two people involved in Manet’s painting to life, the art worker and the sex worker, interrogating the labor of object-making and objecthood. Yet there are three people involved in this painting, three people working, not two. The Black maid holding flowers is equal in Manet’s painting to a curtain or a prop, made out to be less important than even the bouquet she holds. She is disregarded by both white male artist and white female prostitute alike. The differential between the artist-man and the prostitute-woman is based on the greater differential of race, as these positions are born from a social order dependent on slavery and racial servitude. Manet’s painting was created in 1863, not even two decades after the abolition of slavery in France.