The black velvet rope outside the brushed steel entrance to New York City’s Studio 54 is where dreams went to die for many back in 1977. The door policy was strict, arbitrary and designed to do nothing but separate the cool kids from the not-so-cool ones standing on the sidewalk, waving their hands and screaming for Marc or Haoui, the gatekeepers of excessive excess.
Which is where guitarist Nile Rodgers and bassist Bernard Edwards found themselves on New Year’s Eve that year. Founders of the notable and noteworthy band Chic, the two men were sitting on top of two monster singles — “Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah)” and “Everybody Dance” — and confident that getting in was an easy get, mostly on account of having been assured they were guest-listed by their good friend disco diva Grace Jones.
[‘Le Freak’] and the stories surrounding it and disco culture — drugs, bathroom sex, dancing all night — got very popular, very fast. JP Marsal, disc jockey
But even if Jones had remembered to add their names to the list, it still wouldn’t have been an easy get. Warren Beatty, Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Cher and Frank Sinatra never got in, so while it should not have been a surprise when Rodgers and Edwards were waved away, for them it most certainly was. And they were pissed off as they headed back to Edwards’ apartment, Champagne in hand. Pissed off enough to start working on a Studio 54 tribute that had the chorus say, simply, “Ahh, fuck off!”
It was a good bit of fun to take away the sting of being found wanting, somehow minus the requisite level of cool. But before too long, the deceptively simple guitar riff and the sinewy bass line met syncopated hand claps and clipped vocals, and they had something. Something that still said, “Ahh, fuck off!”
Subbing words in, subbing words out, Rodgers and Edwards eventually settled on “Ahh, freak out!” and the song “Le Freak” was born. One of the best parts about it? The slyly subversive mid-song exhortation to “Just come on down, to 54 / Find a spot out on the floor.” Which was, you can be sure, totally untrue for probably 99 percent of people listening. That notwithstanding, the song was an instant hit: Billboard charts, a popular dance of the same name, the best-selling record ever for Atlantic Records and upward of 7 million sold back when people still paid for music. All that and weeks atop the charts in Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.K. Beyond that, the song went into remixes, TV shows, films and TV commercials. Essentially, everything everywhere.
“[‘Le Freak’] and the stories surrounding it and disco culture — drugs, bathroom sex, dancing all night — got very popular, very fast,” says JP Marsal, a DJ based in Lyon, France. “Like you might expect.”
Though Chic soon cruised into some superhard times when the “disco sucks” movement gained purchase in the 1980s and the worm started to turn, Rodgers and Edwards did not. Producing their asses off with everyone from Pharrell Williams to David Bowie and Daft Punk, Rodgers and Edwards abided.
By New Year’s Eve 1978, writes Will Hermes in Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever, “Le Freak” was at No. 1, and Rodgers had a VIP admission card to Studio 54. “But it meant less than it would have the year before.”
+++++++++++ Eugene S. Robinson digs that which can be dug from the business end of culture cool + aims to look as stylish as possible while doing so. He also has a “sunny” personality. And, yes, you can keep those quote marks right where they are.
No Room For Doubt
Green & Gold
Au Cinema
Is Your Love Big Enough ?
Wonderful
Fairytale
Ghost
Lost & Found
Tokyo
Unstoppable
Don’t Wake Me Up
Final Form
Elusive
Grow
Never Get Enough
Midnight
Encore :
Age
I Say A Little Prayer (Burt Bacharach/Hal David)
Forget
in the scheme of things, as flows this river called life, our barges momentarily close to each other, because the currents are what they are, fast running & strong, with an undertow that will sweep you off into areas you don’t want to go if you don’t steer your craft with determination, because there are also so many lights and sights on the shore, so many distractions, so many invitations to dock and get lost in enjoying the landside diversions, because there is sometimes fog on the river and also because of our natural wariness—and that’s really a wrong description, our wariness is not natural, our wariness is “nurtured,” after being on the river awhile one learns that everybody who rides a barge is not necessarily a fellow traveler—because of all of that and more, especially this fog and just the speed we travel, a speed which discourages skipping around from boat to boat, a speed which sometimes does not allow us to fully grasp what is happening as someone whizzes by us and we are also moving real fast and here passes us somebody else moving faster, like amiri baraka says, somebody’s fast is another body’s slow, and who knows when you are on your boat alone or I on mine, alone, who knows, and we be trying to make our way, even those of us straining to push our barge up river, no matter the direction we all are struggling along, all of us once issued from the mouth waters of our mother’s womb are actually headed downward toward that big sea wherein we will become part of the eternal dust/water & spirit of this universe, how long do we have on the river, who knows, where we dock, that is our choice, how long we sit there, and then again, sometimes it is not really our choice, sometimes, like our ancestors we are forced into spaces and not given choices, not given the space to decide how to maneuver and negotiate our time on the river, fortunately, for us, we have a bit more leeway than did our ancestors in this regard—and I give thanx and praise to them because their struggles on, or should I say “in” the river, swimming without aid of boat or oar, swimming sometimes without even driftwood to hold to, swimming with balls and chains shackled to their limbs, the ways in which they miraculously waded through and parted the waters to make a way for us, to create an opportunity for us to acquire barges and boats and other vessels, the navigational lessons they learned and passed down to us, learned on the sly, on the fly, anyway they could, and passed on, goodness, we must give thanx and praise — so here float we, sometimes moving on our own steam, crisscrossing the river of life, sometimes out of fuel just drifting, some times shut down in despair, and sometimes we’re just out there and we’ve got everything we need to keep going except the will to do the hard work of moving our boats along on the big muddy of this river whose waters are increasingly polluted and stinking and sometimes even on fire, rivers literally on fire burning oil slicks, or sometimes we are in serious disrepair, rudders broke, holes in the hull and the like, sometimes got everything we need to move except good common sense so we waste our resources and the richness of our legacies handed down to us from those who struggled to get to the water in the first place, who waged the herculean battle just to get down by the riverside, when I use this metaphor of floating on the river of life, I mean more than just you and i, more than just a line I toss out to make conversation, I mean something so deep, so deep, so when I call out to you in the lightless night or through the morning fog, when I holler out my identifying shout and momentarily maneuver close, close enough so that our barges bump gently against each other, touch and go, as we float on down the river, and it is morning, or just after noon in a crowded river, or late past midnight and we are the only vessels visible in the darkness, or whenever, when I shout and sing my request, ask your permission to board, it is in the fullest awareness that my request is not about a merger of companies but rather a momentary sharing, a temporal but not temporary alignment of spaces and personalities, temporal in that it is time bound, you’ve got places to go, people to meet, things to do, and so do i, and neither of us intends to leave our vessels unattended for long, nor either of us give up our vessel for life aboard the other’s, and similarly, I understand should I hear you sing, unlike sailors mythisizing some madness about the sound of women singing on the water is a siren song that will lead them to ruin, I understand—i’m listening to milton nascimento at this moment and his music is so mystically beautiful, so ethereal, I mean his voice climbs like sunlight descending on a shaft through the clouds except that it reverses the flow and rises where the sunbeam comes down his voice ascends and the melodies he utters and the stories in his voice, I don’t speak portuguese but I hear milton’s meaningful beauty, and when I read the lyrics translated it helps or doesn’t help, but all i’ve really got to do is open my ears and listen, and that is the beauty of great art, we don’t have to know how it was done, in many cases don’t even have to know the language, especially when it’s music or visual, all we have to do is be open to beauty and it will take our hand and lead us there, it will kiss us full on the mouth, lips open with the surprise of the tongue moving lucidly in and out our mouths thrilling us to our toes, ah milton nascimento—I understand you are not asking for anything all the time even though this knowing is forever, the paradox of life on the river, nothing lasts, everything flows on, everything changes, but awareness and knowledge of the deepness and connections between soul mates stretches pass any fence that time can erect, breeches the dams built to hold us back and exploit the movement of our waters, so sometimes I will call to you, or you to me, and if we are close enough and if the time permits, I mean if we are not busy steering through some particular rough waters or on a mission that requires all our attention, if there is time we will tie up to each other and one board the other for a moment, and that’s all I ask, permission to board, not to stay, nor to take anything with me, but to be in you, with you for whatever sharing time there is for us on this river called life, encircled in your embrace, and, of course, you in mine, for whatever time…
Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) – Olympia
In 2013, Bayard Rustin, who died in 1987, was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama, along with Bill Clinton and others. On that occasion progressive radio and television journalist Amy Goodman devoted part of her syndicated broadcast, Democracy Now!, to Rustin’s life and legacy. She introduced Rustin as “a minority within a minority, who tirelessly agitated for change, spending nights, days and weeks in jail opposing US policy at home and abroad-a gay man fighting against homophobia, and a pacifist fighting against endless war.”
A guest on the program was John D’Emilio, who writes in the introduction to his 2003 biography, Lost Prophet that Rustin:
wished more than anything else to remake the world around him. He wanted to shift the balance between white supremacy and racial justice, between violence and cooperation in the conduct of nations, between the wealth and power of the few and poverty and powerlessness of the many.[1]
A widely acclaimed documentary chronicling Rustin’s career, Brother Outsider, by Nancy Kates and Bennett Singer (2003), also celebrates Rustin as a forgotten hero and visionary of the civil rights and peace movements. This high praise is certainly warranted in relation to the earlier parts of Rustin’s life. But, as we shall see, such encomiums either leave out or tend to downplay the far less laudatory later chapters of his biography.
Young, Black and Angry
Although never a campaigner for homosexual rights, Rustin was unapologetically gay in private life, several times hitting back against the attempts of politicians – from Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond to black Democratic congressman Adam Clayton Powell — to slime him for his sexual orientation. He was also a determined anti-racist fighter from an early age. He first protested against racial segregation as a high school student in his native Westchester, Pennsylvania, where he refused to sit in the balcony reserved exclusively for blacks in a movie theater. He went on briefly to join the Young Communist League in his adopted home of New York City. He was active in the CP-led campaign to free the nine Scottsboro Boys, falsely accused of rape and sentenced to die in Alabama’s electric chair. Rustin became disillusioned with the CP when it downplayed civil rights agitation after Hitler invaded the USSR in 1941, on the rationale that fighting for black rights would hinder the American war effort.
Rustin then fell under the influence of the radical clergyman A. J. Muste, who headed the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and of the American Socialist Party of Norman Thomas. His chief mentor soon became the black Socialist labor leader A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Rustin at this time became a principled pacifist, dedicated to a Ghandian philosophy of non-violent agitation for social change. He spent nearly two years in federal prison during World War II for refusing, as a conscientious objector, to serve in the army.
Rustin was also a founder of the civil rights movement. He headed an early version of the Freedom Rides to protest southern Jim Crow laws in 1947, and refused to take his appointed seat on a segregated bus in North Carolina eight years before Rosa Parks did the same in Alabama. For this offense, he did twenty-one days on a chain gang. Rustin helped Martin Luther King to organize northern support for the Birmingham bus boycott in 1956. In an era of near-universal homophobia, King became nervous about being publicly associated with Rustin due to the latter’s earlier arrest on a “morals” charge in California (he was discovered performing oral sex in the back seat of a car), and for a time took his distance, relegating Rustin to a much less visible background role in the movement. But Rustin and King came together once again for the 1963 civil rights march on Washington. Rustin was the leading organizer of that quarter-million-strong outpouring for racial and economic justice. The march is widely regarded as the crowning achievement in the career of a black leader of exemplary dedication and self-sacrifice, of formidable intellectual and oratorical gifts, and organizing skills unmatched by anyone in the civil rights struggle.
It is the years up to and including 1963 that the devotees of Rustin’s memory prefer to emphasize. We would, however, be unfaithful to the historical record if we were to ignore a less uplifting sequel. From the time that the administration of Lyndon Johnson embraced major parts of the civil rights agenda, Rustin pursued and increasingly rightward trajectory. The principled pacifist ended up supporting (with occasional qualms) the Vietnam War and promoted the intensification of the nuclear arms race; the champion of black rights apologized for the intervention of the South African apartheid régime in the Angolan civil war in the 1970s. It can be said without exaggeration that Rustin ended his life as a neo-conservative.
In Transition
To understand this transformation, it is necessary to introduce a figure absent from Amy Goodman’s tribute and Brother Outsider, and mentioned in only a few lines of D’Emilio’s biography. His name was Max Shachtman.
A writer, speaker and politician of great energy and outstanding gifts, Shachtman first came to prominence on the American left as a follower of Leon Trotsky. He broke with Trotsky, however, in 1940 over the question of whether the Socialist Workers Party (the American Trotskyist group) should continue to defend the Soviet Union in the wake of the Stalin-Hitler pact. Trotsky argued that the USSR was worthy of defense despite the pact and horrors of Stalinism. Shachtman, on the other hand, maintained what he called a third-camp position, equidistant from Stalinist totalitarianism and western imperialism.
Yet Shachtman did not remain for very long in the third camp. Throughout the 40s and 50s, he moved steadily to the right, ultimately coming to see Stalinism as the greater evil, and adopting an increasingly friendly attitude toward the US and its cold war allies. On the home front, Shachtman concluded, after unsuccessful attempts to organize socialist groups independent of the two major parties, that the Democratic Party was the main arena in which socialists should work. Within the party itself, he looked to labor officialdom — at first in the person of the head of the United Auto Workers, Walter Reuther — as the principal vehicle of the leftward Democratic realignment that he proclaimed as his objective. But opposing groupings within the Democratic Party and AFL-CIO fell out over the Vietnam War in the 1960s, resulting in the temporary departure of Reuther and the UAW from the labor federation to protest the leadership’s support for the war. Shachtman, on the other hand, cast his lot with organized labor’s pro-war right wing, headed by George Meany, and with the Democratic Party mainstream of Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey.
Rustin was Shachtman’s main liaison with the civil rights movement, and , along with his aging mentor, A. Philip Randolph, followed a political path that coincided in all major respects with that of Shachtman. Rustin’s admirers can hardly ignore his pro-establishment drift, but tend to portray it as a pragmatic decision to remain silent on Vietnam in order not to jeopardize his civil rights and social welfare agenda. But Rustin did not merely fail to speak out against the war. He was also extremely vociferous when it came to condemning the Black Power movement, anti-war mobilizations and the New Left.
The watershed moment in Rustin’s career occurred at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. The convention took place during the Freedom Summer, when the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was mounting an intensive voter registration drive in the South, in the course of which three civil rights workers — Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney — met their deaths at the hands of Mississippi racist vigilantes, acting in collaboration with local police. The newly formed Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) elected a group of delegates to Atlantic City to challenge the credentials of the regular all-white delegation, which had been selected by a process barred to blacks. As the devastating testimony before the credentials committee of Fannie Lou Hamer, a middle-aged black sharecropper, concerning the reign of terror against black people in her state, was broadcast on national television, Lyndon Johnson scrambled to make the MFDP challenge disappear. Johnson continually invoked the bogey of a victory of his far-right opponent, Barry Goldwater, in the November elections to bring MFDP sympathizers into line. His two principal lieutenants in this fight were future vice-president Hubert Humphrey, and UAW chief Walter Reuther. (In taped phone conversations that have recently become public, we can hear Johnson handing out marching orders in his almost daily phone calls to Reuther, and the auto workers’ president responding with fulsome flattery.)
Finally, the challengers were offered a compromise under which the state’s full Jim Crow delegation would be seated at the convention, and the MFDP would be apportioned two at-large delegates, not self-selected but handpicked by the Democratic leadership-a move designed to keep Hamer from speaking on the convention floor. The Johnson team pulled out all stops to force upon the MFDP an offer that most members of the delegation deemed a betrayal of their purpose. Reuther made a point of telling the MFDP legal counsel, Joseph Raugh, that his firm’s principal client, the UAW, would take its business elsewhere if he did not join in urging the compromise upon the MFDP. Raugh capitulated, but failed to persuade the delegation, which ultimately rejected Johnson’s offer. During protracted and stormy debates among the delegates, it soon became apparent that the president’s men had another important ally, Bayard Rustin, who strenuously urged acceptance. In exasperation, one SNCC member shouted, “You’re a traitor, Bayard!”[2]
In an article, “From Protest to Politics”, in Commentary the following February, Rustin laid out the main lines of a political approach that was to separate him from the radicalism that emerged from the civil rights movement in response to the freedom summer and disillusionment with the Democrats. Rustin argued that the main barriers to black progress in the future would consist less of legal discrimination than economic disadvantage. The remedies-jobs programs, housing construction and aid to education-could not be obtained by the confrontational tactics – like lunch-counter sit-ins and freedom rides – employed to fight de jure segregation. They rather required large-scale intervention on the part of the federal government. The main force favoring such things was organized labor, and the principal tactic was pressure within the Democratic Party to expand Johnson’s War on Poverty and break with the Dixiecrats. It never seems to have entered Rustin’s mind that the fight for economic equality might, like the struggle against segregation, be driven forward by non-electoral means, such as King hoped to employ in the Poor People’s Campaign he was planning at the time of his assassination. There was also no mention at all of the firestorm that was consuming government funds initially earmarked for the War on Poverty, and driving the country’s youth, black and white, in ever-growing numbers away from the Democratic Party: the war in Vietnam. Along with the civil rights bills that Johnson pushed through Congress, he also introduced the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, authorizing what was soon to become a massive aerial assault on North Vietnam.
The Test of Vietnam
Rustin was aware that he could only remain on the fair-weather side of the political coalition to which he had hitched his wagon by dissociating himself from anyone in the emerging anti-war movement whose differences with the Johnson administration transgressed its fundamental cold-war framework. Thus, when Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) issued a call for an anti-war demonstration in Washington in the spring of 1965, and welcomed all who opposed the war, Rustin and his co-thinkers instantly understood that such a non-exclusionary policy would allow the participation of groups that were calling for the total and immediate withdrawal of US troops, not to mention those who openly supported the victory of the Viet Cong. Rustin thus added his voice to the anti-SDS red baiting chorus that preceded what turned out to be a march whose attendance of 25,000 greatly exceeded the expectations of organizers, and inaugurated the era of mass anti-war demonstrations. Rustin’s signature appeared along with those of Socialist Party head Norman Thomas and A.J. Muste on a statement warning people away from the march. According to Kirkpatrick Sale in his history of SDS, “.this group managed to get the New York Post to run a prominent editorial on the very eve of the march featuring this statement and going on to issue warnings about `attempts to convert the event into a pro-Communist production’ and `a frenzied, one-sided anti-American show.’ ” [3] Rustin’s position on the march led to a rift with two other anti-war pacifists with whom he co-edited Liberation magazine, Dave Dellinger and Staughton Lynd. In an article in the magazine, Lynd accused Rustin of advocating a “coalition with the marines.” Rustin resigned from the editorial board shortly thereafter.
It was not a betrayal of Rustin’s integrationist and pacifist principles to oppose those sections of the radicalizing black movements of the 60s that rejected non-violence and embraced one or another variety of black separatism. Rustin famously debated Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. But Rustin also proved to be a determined foe of the efforts of even those who espoused nonviolence and racially integrated struggle-such as that advocated by Martin Luther King and his close adviser, James Bevel-against the Vietnam War. When in 1967, King made the momentous decision to speak out against the war at Riverside Church in New York City and join an anti-war march at the United Nations, Rustin was prominent among those who urged King against taking this step. Apparently, the famous photograph that weighed so heavily in King’s decision – of a young girl running from a US-torched Vietnamese village, her face contorted with pain and her naked body seared with napalm-did not have a similar effect on Rustin.
Facing Right
As the Vietnam war loosened the grip of anti-Communist ideology, and the student and minority movements of the 60s became increasingly radicalized, several “democratic socialists” who had previously operated within the cold-war framework – such as Michael Harrington and Norman Thomas – expressed some misgivings about their political past. Bayard Rustin was not among them. In the final decades of his life, he moved even further to the right. As early as 1966, he had joined Norman Thomas in the Committee on Free Elections in the Dominican Republic, a CIA front group aimed at legitimizing rigged elections in 1966 to prevent the return to office of Juan Bosch, a reformist president effectively ousted by the invasion of 42,000 US troops in the previous year.
By this time, Rustin had become co-director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, funded mainly by George Meany and the AFL-CIO leadership, and an election monitor for Freedom House. In 1972 he became a co-chairman of the virulently anti-Communist Social Democrats, USA, previously headed by Max Shachtman. In 1976, he joined with Paul Nitze to found the Committee on the Present Danger, which advocated a nuclear arms buildup against the USSR. He was a fervent supporter of Israel and a regular contributor to Commentary magazine, edited by one of the founders of neo-conservatism, Norman Podhoretz.
Anyone who doubts just how far to the right Rustin had moved would do well to have a look at an article that appeared in the Commentary of October, 1978, which he co-authored with future Reagan appointee, Carl Gershman. Entitled “Africa, Soviet Imperialism and the Retreat of American Power”, the article blasts the Carter administration for taking a complacent attitude toward the Soviet and Cuban aid to the People’s Front for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), which had led the independence struggle against Portugal. They argued that Carter, paralyzed by the Vietnam syndrome and fearful of undermining détente, was allowing the Soviet Union to gain a foothold in Africa, and urged greater aid to the anti-Soviet UNITA. Headed by Jonas Savimbi, UNITA guerillas had posed as independence fighters while secretly colluding with the Portuguese. Rustin and Gershman had this to say about the fact that UNITA was also aided by a South African intervention force:
And if a South African force did intervene at the urging of black leaders. to counter a non-African army of Cubans ten times its size, by what standard of political judgment is this immoral?
The authors also worry lest the administration become overly fixated on the rights of the black African majority:
…the suppression of blacks by whites is not the only human rights issue in Africa. Virtually all governments in Africa are undemocratic to one degree or another, but nowhere does democracy have less chance of evolving than in the kind of totalitarian party dictatorships which the Soviet Union is in the process of trying to implant in Africa. Not to resist this development, but to concentrate solely on the black-white problem, undermines the moral credibility of the administration.
We see in this passage an early formulation of the distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian régimes, popularized by Reagan’s UN ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, as a rationale for supporting the Nicaraguan contras and the death-squad government of El Salvador (which Kirkpatrick said was only authoritarian, as opposed to Communist-totalitarian). This article is unmentioned in D’Emilio’s biography.
Principles of Convenience
It is easy to determine if one is acting on principle when doing so entails defying the established order and enduring the kind of sacrifice and marginalization that Rustin experienced in his younger years. However, when one’s principles happen to coincide with those of the powerful, and their espousal confers status and material rewards, disentangling the threads of opportunism from those of genuine belief becomes a lot harder. Admirers point out that, even in his later years, Rustin maintained a strong commitment to racial justice and social equality. And his political thinking did display a certain internal logic: if “Communist totalitarianism” was worse than western racism or imperialism, one could conclude that the latter should be supported as the lesser evil. Rustin’s final neo-conservatism indeed represented the end-point in the evolution of a definite strand of social-democratic thought and practice, represented above all by Max Shachtman and his Social Democrats, USA.
Yet it is also not unfair to say that this political tendency epitomized the devil’s bargain offered up by the more liberal and enlightened custodians of the American empire in its heyday: a certain commitment to social reform at home in exchange for support of the global régime of private property, and its defense against all those forces that seriously threatened it, be they Stalinist governments, left-nationalist reformers, or national liberation movements-all conveniently amalgamated under the rubric of the “Communist menace.” It was this devil’s deal that Shachtman and Rustin embraced with both arms. For them, the coups that toppled nationalist reformers like Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala, or Bosch in the Dominican Republic because they threatened to nationalize US corporate property; the massacre of an estimated million Indonesians who supported the Sukarno government and the Communist Party, or the hecatombs of Vietnam, were not too heavy a price to pay for the passage of a civil rights bill or the funding of a government anti-poverty program. Their politics were, in the end, virtually indistinguishable from those of the so-called Scoop Jackson Democrats, named after the Democratic senator from Washington State (aka the “senator from Boeing”), who favored both the welfare state at home and militarism abroad. Moreover, they stood by the bargain they had made even as it was becoming increasingly apparent that the US government was having difficulty delivering guns and butter at the same time, and would opt for the former when it came time to choose.
It would also be much easier to ascribe the politics of Rustin’s twilight-years to belief alone if there had been no perks or material rewards-no rides in Hubert Humphrey’s limousine, no White House visits, no honorary degrees from Yale and Harvard, and, above all, no reliance on regular paychecks from George Meany and the AFL-CIO to fund the A. Philip Randolph Institute, which Rustin directed. Perhaps he was able to preserve some shred of self-respect from his radical past with the knowledge that-unlike Norman Thomas and others who were paid directly by the CIA-he supported the Cold War out of continuing loyalty to the labor movement (read: the right wing of the trade-union bureaucracy). But regardless of where the money came from, the politics it underwrote were the same.
Even John D’Emilio, Rustin’s sympathetic biographer, strongly suggests the existence of an implicit quid pro quo:
…George Meany, always a cold warrior, made support for the president an undebatable proposition within the AFL-CIO. Had Rustin become too strongly identified with anti-war forces, there was a risk he might have lost funding for the Randolph Institute.[4]
And further on:
George Houser, who had worked closely with Rustin. thought he “just made a practical decision that, `if I’m going to survive in this world, then I have got to play a different game, because there’s no place for me in just maintaining contact with a small radical group. How do I manage myself?’ I think he made a conscious decision about that.” [5]
And finally:
Shizu Ashai Proctor, a former FOR [Fellowship of Reconciliation] secretary whom Rustin had thoroughly captivated in the 1940s, ran into him on a subway platform in Manhattan. She hadn’t seen him in many years but had followed his career. Talking about old times and commenting on his current circumstances, Rustin made a comment that, almost three decades later, remained engraved in her memory. “You get tired after a while,” he told her, “and you have to come home to something you can count on.” Well into his fifties at the time of this encounter, Rustin had experienced a lifetime on the margins. The Randolph Institute provided a secure political home, allowed a considerable measure of autonomy, and gave him the opportunity to express his prodigious energies. As America began to spin out of control because of the passions unleashed by the war, Rustin chose to set himself firmly on a particular ground, and he never reconsidered.[6]
If one were to limit the definition of “selling out” to the drawing up of an explicit contract stipulating the exchange of political utterances and actions “x” in exchange for perks and sums of money “y”, one would be hard put to find any examples of selling out in the entire history of the left. Political shifts are almost invariably accompanied by professed changes of belief. The fact, however, that some views will lead to federal prison and the chain gang, while others to the portals of power and a steady meal ticket is a distinction that should not be overlooked in attempting to dissect the motives of historical figures. As a man who fought black oppression and suffered as a gay, Rustin appears to many contemporary progressives as an attractive figure. And while his later choices should not prevent us from appreciating his genuine contributions, neither should these choices be allowed to slip down a memory hole in any rush to celebrate unsung heroes. One can easily understand why Barack Obama views Bayard Rustin as an exemplary civil rights leader. We on the left, however, should examine the past with a far more critical eye.
1. John D’Emilio, Lost Prophet (Chicago, 2003), p.2
2. Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire (New York, 1998), p.473
3. Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York, 1974), p. 179
4. John D’Emilio, Lost Prophet, (Chicago, 2003), p. 447
5. Ibid., p.447
6. Ibid., Pp. 447-448
+++++++++++ [Jim Creegan was chairman of the Penn State chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the 1960s, lectured in philosophy in the 70s, he was a union shop steward during the late 80s and 90s. He lives in New York City, now unaffiliated but unresigned. His writings often appear in the Weekly Worker (UK).]
Since 1990, the James Beard Foundation has put on an annual awards show that, in more ways than one, stands as the food and drink industry’s version of the Academy Awards. Every spring, the James Beard Foundation Awards (JBFA) recognizes outstanding American restaurateurs, chefs, food journalists and writers, winemakers, and others.
Even making it to the long list of nominees is cause for celebration, adding to the prestige of restaurants and serving as an undeniable gold star on a chef’s resume. The food media often spotlights nominees when they’re announced, providing free publicity that can translate to increased business and savvier patrons. Thus, the competition to get even this far is intense: this year, the semifinalists for the 21 categories within the Restaurant & Chef Awards were reportedly whittled down from 20,000 online nominations. Today, March 15, the Foundation announced the finalists for awards such as Best New Restaurant, Outstanding Pastry Chef, and Outstanding Chef, as well as for a slew a regionally specific chef awards.
In the years since I entered the restaurant world, I’ve had the same conversation with coworkers and peers around this time about our impressions of the James Beard Awards. From my perspective, the nominees have always seemed fairly homogenous—that is to say, white and male. My coworkers in the kitchen noticed the same thing. But I never took the time to confirm if my suspicions were based in a quantifiable reality or just a hunch. There’s no question that most of the hard-working chefs and talented industry professionals on the lists of nominees have earned their accolades. At the same time, I can’t help quelling what I admit is a gut reaction, as a woman of color in the industry: a feeling like I’ve mistakenly entered the wrong room.
As reported by Rosner, among the individual semifinalists for the Foundation’s 2016 Restaurant & Chef Awards, 257 are men and 84 are women. So that makes for 24.6 percent women represented overall. The percentage of nominees who are women would be 18.1 percent if not for the two separate categories for bakers and pastry chefs.
According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2015, 19.6 percent of the 415,000 chefs and head cooks in the United States are women. If you fold in the data for “bakers,” the percent of women in the industry goes up to 34.3 percent. It’s worth noting that the food service industry as a whole is 54.5 percent women; that includes line cooks, bartenders, dishwashers, servers, and so on. While the majority of people employed in the industry are women, the numbers show that the most esteemed and “creative” positions are, more often than not, occupied by men.
It’s not for lack of interest, either: Last year, Eater NY restaurant critic Ryan Sutton reported in Bloomberg, “Women have made up over 40 percent of the International Culinary Center’s classic (i.e. non-pastry) graduates for the past decade. At the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, female enrollment in the culinary arts associates program has risen from 28 percent in 2003 to as high as 35 percent in 2012.” And yet, he found that women were sparse, if not non-existent, in kitchen leadership positions within America’s top restaurant groups. The James Beard Awards reflect that disparity industry-wide. In 2014, Eater published a detailed gender breakdown of JBFA nominees and winners by year, showing a gradual uptick in the proportion of women being recognized. This likely is owed to the fact that the JBFA has done a great job of reaching gender parity within its awards committees, who select the semifinalists from the nomination pool. This year, women are the majority (9 out of 17 members) of the Restaurant & Chef committee, which is mainly made up of food writers and editors.
The greater food industry has a long way to go as far as reaching gender parity, but, perhaps owing to the burgeoning input of outspoken food writers and chefs like Anita Lo (chef/owner of Annisa); Amanda Cohen (chef/owner of Dirt Candy); Hillary Dixler, Paula Forbes, and Helen Rosner (Eater); and Kat Kinsman (Tasting Table), conversations about unequal press coverage, maternity leave issues, disparate pay, and misogyny in the restaurant kitchen have already made their way into mainstream publications.
Going down the list, I found that about 79 percent of the JBFA Restaurant & Chef semifinalists are white (non-Hispanic, non-Latinx), 11 percent are Asian-Pacific Islanders, five percent were Hispanic or Latinx, two percent are Middle Eastern-North African, and one percent are Black Americans. I gathered the data on race by cross-referencing press releases, interviews, bios, and other information. Cases where the individual did not disclose their race or ethnicity went into the “Other” category, which turned out to be two percent of the nominees.
These numbers show that people of color are underrepresented among James Beard Award nominees compared to the percent of the food industry workforce we make up. Federal employment data shows that among chefs and head cooks, 19.3 are Hispanic or Latinx, 15.2 percent are Black Americans, and 16.8 percent are Asian-Pacific Islanders. (They did not have data on other racial and ethnic groups in the industry.)
While numerous food media outlets have done great reporting on issues around gender in the kitchen, the question of racial representation in the JBFA has remained largely unadressed. How can there be such a disconnect between the demographics of the individual nominees and the industry at large when the JBF’s stated mission is the “celebrate, nurture, and honor America’s diverse culinary heritage”? Surely it’s not due to a lack of diversity within the industry itself, as the data from the Bureau of Labor & Statistics shows. In fact, organizations like the National Restaurant Association openly tout the industry’s employment of numerous women and people of color as a strength. Rather, the difference lies in entrenched racial and gender discrimination that keeps minority workers in the lowest paid and least-recognized tiers of the restaurant industry.
These barriers include the lack of affordable childcare for working class parents, a lack of diversity among industry gatekeepers, limited training for fine dining service interactions, closed-network job postings, and a general unwillingness among restaurant owners to discuss racial issues in their staffing. Despite (or even because of) the latter, much of the problem lies in implicit discrimination: an unspoken or coded system of determining who belongs where. Hiring managers can use code words like “clean-cut,” “greasy,” “articulate,” or “communicative” to sort candidates along racialized criteria without being subject to charges of racism.
Unsurprisingly, the “Ending Jim Crow” study also found that these challenges are compounded for workers who are women of color. One of the co-founders of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, Saru Jayaraman, was honored by the JBFA with a Leadership Award in 2015 for her work in this field. As Jayaraman pointed out in a New York Times op-ed this fall, restaurants’ economic structure—along with their reliance on tipping—lead to a wage gap (African American female servers make on average just 40 percent less than male servers) and a climate of rampant sexual harassment. “The restaurant industry is the single largest source of sexual harassment claims in the United States,” writes Jayaraman. “Women forced to live on tips are compelled to tolerate inappropriate and degrading behavior from customers, co-workers and managers in order to make a living.”
Restaurant worker advocate Saru Jayaraman. Photo courtesy of ROC.
It seems strange that the JBFA would honor a restaurant labor activist like Jayaraman for her work while perpetuating a cycle of homogeneity in their chef awards. In fact, applying the Restaurant Opportunity Center’s findings to the practices and voting procedures of the JBFA might actually help identify its problem of representation and recognition of industry minorities.
For example, as shown earlier, the demographic makeup of the gatekeepers—in this case, the Restaurant & Chef Awards committee—can go a long way in determining which nominees make the cut into the nominees. But the problem with stacking a committee with food writers is that racial and class diversity within food writing and editing is miniscule. Though the JBFA has taken measures to makes the committee regionally diverse, the sweeping majority of committee members are white.
Additionally, as chef Mario Batali told The New York Times, the finalist voting process that takes place after the long list of nominees is released “results in little more than a popularity contest.” Though he made these remarks in 2004, this part of the process has not changed much since then. Once announced, the ballot is distributed online to a voting body of over 300 previous James Beard Restaurant & Chef Award winners, 250 panelists divided evenly among 10 regions, and 17 members of the Restaurant and Chef Award subcommittee. Eating at the nominees’ restaurants is not a stated requirement to voting for this final round, much like how viewing all of the nominated films is not a requirement for voting in the Academy Awards. And with more than 300 semifinalists, it would be physically impossible to do so in the month before votes are due to be cast.
It’s a catch-22: Voters have to rely on press coverage to fill in the gaps of their knowledge. But generally the chefs and restaurants who get awards also get the most publicity, so the cycle of hype and awards is self-perpetuating. In addition, having more than half of the voters be previous award winners in a pool that has historically included a vast majority of white men dilutes any sort of intentional diversity. Like the process of restaurant owners casting for new employees within their current employees’ social networks, the JBFA’s voting process leaves plenty of room for demographic self-replication, even when it is informed by the best of intentions.
Excluding women and people of color from the cycle of awards and press for chefs and restaurants exacerbates the employment challenges outlined by ROC’s study. Chef Amanda Cohen bluntly outlined the process in 2013 for the NY Times:
“Restaurants engage in a lot of strategies to attract the press. They host special dinners, they hire expensive publicists, they lobby to be invited to the ‘right’ industry events where they can meet journalists. Getting into that world takes a big commitment of time and money, and because female chefs get less coverage, they attract fewer investors, and they may not have the resources to gain entry.
I understand why this cycle exists. If I were an investor choosing between a male and a female chef, both of whom were equally talented, it would make more sense to go with the man every time, because he’d get more press, which will earn more awards, which will attract more customers.”
As a highly influential tastemaker in the American culinary scene, the JBFA plays a large part in deciding the literal Who’s Who every year. We’ve seen in recent years that the JBFA is more than capable of changing its practices to be more inclusive, and in so doing, improve the visibility of people who often get stuck in the underbelly of “America’s diverse culinary heritage.” This year, the JBFA’s galas will be hosted by two people of color: chefs Carla Hall and Ming Tsai. Hopefully next year, we will see more people of color on that stage who aren’t just there as the entertainment.
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SOLEIL HO – Soleil cooks for a living and writes sometimes. When she was in kindergarten, she reviewed a book for Reading Rainbow that she didn’t actually read. She cohosts Racist Sandwich, a soon-to-be-released podcast on food and identity politics.
While sitting in press minutes after her finals loss at Indian Wells, Serena Williams blasted the event’s tournament director, Raymond Moore, who was under fire Sunday for making outdated, sexist comments before the match. Moore insinuated the survival of women’s tennis depends on male stars such as Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, comments that were especially absurd given that the biggest tennis star in America was about to take the court.
While Twitter was already up in arms about the comments, Serena got up on the dais and basically dropped the mic on him.
But first, here were Moore’s incendiary comments. He was asked about the importance of his tournament to the WTA and took the question in another direction:
No, I think the WTA — you know, in my next life when I come back I want to be someone in the WTA, (laughter) because they ride on the coattails of the men. They don’t make any decisions and they are lucky. They are very very lucky.
Moore (R) poses with men’s finalist Novak Djokovic. (Photo by Matthew Stockman/Getty Images)
If I was a lady player, I’d go down every night on my knees and thank God that Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal were born, because they have carried this sport. They really have.
But, oh, Moore wasn’t done. For his next trick, he mentioned the “attractive prospects” on the WTA and how they could help the sport (seemingly from getting off Federer’s coattails). Then he named two women who are excellent players and could very well take the torch from Serena and Sharapova, but also happen to be two of the more physically attractive women on Tour, a fact that led to the awkward, cringeworthy exchange below.
The comments started a controversy that was building during the match, so by the time Serena came out for her press conference, it was the key topic of the afternoon. She answered each question like a boss. (Here are the best answers, condensed.)
“Obviously I don’t think any woman should be down on their knees thanking anybody like that.
“If I could tell you every day how many people say they don’t watch tennis unless they’re watching myself or my sister, I couldn’t even bring up a number. So I don’t think that is a very accurate statement.
“I think there is a lot of women out there who are more exciting to watch. I think there are a lot of men out there who are exciting to watch. I think it definitely goes both ways. I think those remarks are very much mistaken and very, very, very inaccurate. […]
“We, as women, have come a long way. We shouldn’t have to drop to our knees at any point. […]
“In order to make a comment [like that] you have to have history and you have to have facts and you have to knows things. I mean, you look at someone like Billie Jean King who opened so many doors for not only women’s players but women’s athletes in general.”
I feel like that is such a disservice to her and every female, not only a female athlete but every woman on this planet that has ever tried to stand up for what they believed in and being proud to be a woman.
(AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
Boom.
Saying that “a lady player” should thank Federer and Nadal for keeping the sport going under is something that, if phrased in a way that didn’t sound like a quote from 1954, might be a reasonable opinion. Wrong, but reasonable. But it is wrong, because Serena has been around far longer than Federer and Nadal and has carried women’s tennis just as much as they’ve carried men’s – probably more, in fact. Serena said it herself: How many new fans did she and Venus bring into tennis? Federer and Nadal may have kept fans around. Serena brought them in. During the brief era between Sampras/Agassi and the Federer/Nadal age, when people wondered whether tennis was going to be able to find a new breed of men’s star, it was Serena and Venus who drew attention to the game – not the women’s game, but the whole one.
(Photo by Julian Finney/Getty Images)
Every tennis player, man or woman, should be thanking the sport’s stars (Federer, Nadal, Djokovic and, yes, Serena, Venus and Sharapova). They move the needle, get TV contracts signed and increase prize money. This is true of every sport. NBAers owe a ton to Bird, Magic and Jordan. Every golfer is indebited to Tiger Woods for his impact on the sport and its financial strength. The statement is fine when it’s applicable, but suggesting that the WTA would somehow be on sports welfare without top men’s players isn’t.
There are differences between men’s and women’s tennis though. The WTA is poorly run. And through every metric, men’s tennis is more popular than women’s. (Serena mentioned that the women’s U.S. Open final sold out last year before the men’s final, which was impressive, but the fact that such a story was newsworthy only reinforces that point.) This is wholly irrelevant though.
(Photo by Brad Barket/Getty Images)
Just because football is more popular than baseball doesn’t mean Bryce Harper needs to thank Tom Brady for keeping sports in the limelight. Women’s tennis does just fine and, frankly, Indian Wells should be thanking Serena for returning to the tournament 14 years after an ugly racial incident there and surely raising the tourney’s profile (not to mention giving it a ton of free publicity), not rudely insinuating she owes anything to men’s players she preceded in the limelight. I mean, Serena had seven Grand Slams before anyone had heard of Rafael Nadal!
At least Moore, who somehow was still prominently featured in both men’s and women’s trophy ceremonies after the controversy erupted, exhibited at least one bit of good sense on Sunday (or simply sensed the story was about to blow up) and issued an apology for his crass statement:
For all the dumb stuff Raymond Moore said on Sunday, at least he delivered a good apology.
It is a distinct honor to receive this award that is named for the brave and brilliant Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish. Mahmoud Darwish wrote from the very heart of dispossession, cruelty, oppression and terror. That his own heart eventually gave out, and that he died at a relatively young age, is testament to his sufferings as a highly conscious, well educated and well traveled Palestinian. When I think of him I am reminded of how many of us, especially in these dark times, live mainly by the will of our deep love of our peoples, our cultures, our memories, ourselves – as the expression of thousands of years, and more, of existence on this extraordinary planet.
I believe the issue of Palestine and its liberation to be the defining Movement for Freedom and Autonomy of our time. It is often possible to tell almost everything one needs to know about a person by how they perceive what is happening to the Palestinian people. Though many still claim ignorance of Palestine’s history of dispossession under Zionist Israeli rule, more and more of the world has committed to study the real history, as opposed to the contrived, and can see clearly what has been, and is still, being done: The bombing of cities, the stealing of land, houses and businesses, the unconscionable battering, incarceration and murder of Palestinians of any age or sex, but especially the hunting down and killing of children. Every day in my Inbox I am informed of these child murders, which, as a mother, but really as a human being, I find almost unbearable.
How can a world prosper, in any respect, from the barbarity we are witnessing against a people whose “crime” is that they exist in their own land? And who can consider themselves safe in a world where atrocities without end are now commonplace?
What is to be done? The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) Movement has given the awakened world a tool with which to resist what is happening. Though it is a non-violent, selective protest against the actual violence of Israeli/American assault that includes use of white phosphorus bombs, it is under attack. Still, it is, at this point, our most potent option of resistance. We must do our best to defend it.
We must also insist that our entertainers and politicians visit Gaza and the West Bank before they sign up to embarrass us in Tel Aviv.
Making the world a better place begins with each of us: we have a duty, as human beings, to look on our brothers and sisters in other lands as our Other Selves. In every horrid situation or condition we witness, anywhere on the earth, we must imagine our own selves, our children, our parents, our grandparents and our friends, there as well. This is the beginning of compassion. Love of the whole of humanity, the whole of the planet, not just the part you feel belongs to you, or the part you feel you will always enjoy in comfort or safety.
Standing with the Palestinian people in their time of need, witnessing their courage, creativity, humor and generosity of all kinds, has been the most challenging work of my life, perhaps equal only to my years of helping to end segregation and its violence in Mississippi in the 1960s.
Just as I discovered the black people of Mississippi to be my own kin, in culture, persistence, humor, and determination, I find “family” among the Palestinian people.
Because, after all, what makes us belong to each other? It is our willingness to stand beside and with those who need us. As we need them to show us who we truly can be or already are.
I thank you, people of Palestine, as I perpetually thank the black people of Mississippi, for showing me who I am, and who I might continue to be, or might still become. This is a teaching, a gift, beyond price. There is no end to its usefulness.
Three deep bows.
Alice Walker
From: A Lover From Palestine, by Mahmoud Darwish
In the briar-covered mountains I saw you,
A shepherdess without sheep,
Pursued among the ruins.
You were my garden, and I a stranger,
Knocking at the door, my heart,
For upon my heart stand firm
The door and windows, the cement and stones.
I have seen you in casks of water, in granaries,
Broken, I have seen you a maid in night clubs,
I have seen you in the gleam of tears and in wounds.
You are the other lung in my chest;
You are the sound on my lips;
You are water; you are fire.
I saw you at the mouth of the cave, at the cavern,
Hanging your orphans’ rags on the wash line.
In the stoves, in the streets I have seen you.
In the barns and in the sun’s blood.
In the songs of the orphaned and the wretched I have seen you.
I have seen you in the salt of the sea and in the sand.
Yours was the beauty of the earth, of children and of Arabian jasmine.
And I have vowed
To fashion from my eyelashes a kerchief,
And upon it to embroider verses for your eyes,
And a name, when watered by a heart that dissolves in chanting,
Will make the sylvan arbours grow.
I shall write a phrase more precious than honey and kisses:
‘Palestinian she was and still is’.
Just in case you forgot she was a boss, the gymnast hit up the American Cup and sprinkled #BlackGirlMagic all over it.
Gabby Douglas took home the gold in the American Cup on March 5, 2016.Colorlines screenshot of USA Gymnastics’ video, taken March 7, 2016.
In 2012, Gabby Douglas made history when she became the first woman of color—and the first African-American gymnast—to earn the title of individual all-around champion, and the first American gymnast to ever take home gold in both the individual and team competitions.
Just in case you forgot how awe-inspiring she is, the now 20-year-old dropped by the American Cup on Saturday (March 5) and shut things down. USA today reports that Douglas won the gold after posting the high score in every routine except the floor exercise. She is well on her way toward competing in her second Olympic games—something only six American women have done since 1980.
Watch a few of the routines that propelled Douglas to victory below.
W. E. B. Du Bois famously wrote that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line”. All of us now are well into the twenty-first century, and for contemporary Europeans, Du Bois’ remarks may appear distant a second time over: off his spelling of ‘color’ we can read his Americanness. And yet the problem Du Bois’ addresses here is (despite his spellings) our problem too, on either side of the Atlantic, and beyond. Although his remarks on the “color-line” are most commonly associated with The Souls of Black Folk and its concern with black life in the United States, he in fact first offered them to a London audience at the first Pan-African Conference, in a speech entitled “To the nations of the World”. As he puts it here, “the problem of the color-line” is the question as to how far differences of race … will hereafter be made the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to their utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization”. Hence, Du Bois took this problem to be not only of local, but, first and foremost, of global relevance and thus to affect most of those who are non-white. In different locations, however, the manifestations of this problem–that is, the contours of racial categories, the social meaning associated with those categories, and the pressing issues of racial injustice–may nevertheless be markedly different.
In light of this, there is something of a lacuna in the emerging literature on the historically neglected philosophy of ‘race’ which has seen a flowering of interest in the last twenty years: much of it assumes, either tacitly or explicitly, an US-American audience, and addresses the phenomena of race and racism primarily salient to a distinctively US-American context. In order to help close this lacuna, this conference aims to widen the conversation beyond the context of the US. We thus seek both to increase our understanding of race and racism in different global contexts, and to asses what the contextual variability of race and racism tells us about these phenomena.
We invite abstracts of 300-500 words for 30 minute papers addressing race and/or racism. Priority will be given to papers that explore these phenomena in global contexts other than the US, or that explore the implications of their contextual variability. We also particularly welcome work that engages with legacies of European colonialism. Possible topics include the nature of racial oppression/domination and/or structural injustice, the intersection of racism with other forms of oppression (e.g. misogyny, heterosexism, transphobia, ableism), the connections between race in the academy and activist movements, the meta-philosophical implications of accounting for race or racism, the metaphysics of race, racial ideology and epistemologies of ignorance, and the requirements of racial justice.
Submissions should be made via easychair by the 23rd of April. We will let our decision be known by the 1st of May. For details about the accessibility of the conference location, see the ‘Access’ section of our website.
The Pink Door Women’s Writing Retreat is exclusively
for writers of color. It serves to promote community
and dialogue for writers currently excluded from the
dominant cultural narrative; it actively seeks to bring
Black women, women of color, trans women and
gender non-conforming writers / activists / scholars /
rebels and regional voices into exchange & engagement
with each other to provide a space for mentorship and
exploration of ideas while building an active and
informed literary community. This gathering is a low-cost alternative to the usual
writing retreats that present insurmountable financial
and class barriers. Attendees can expect ten hearty home-cooked meals,
three daring writing workshops and three panel
discussions curated by some of the fiercest writers/
speakers in the country. Oh, and lots of mighty juju
rising up from our brilliant bodies to polish the moon.
WHERE IS IT?
The retreat is held in the city of Rochester in upstate
New York. The neighborhood is nestled between
Ontario Lake and the upper and lower falls.
Convenience, beauty supply and grocery stores are
all within walking distance.
WHEN IS IT?
The fifth annual Pink Door Women’s Writing Retreat
will be held from Wednesday, July 27th to Saturday,
July 30th. Writers will have the opportunity to read
during Poetry & Pie Night’s public event on that Saturday.
Applications open up March 15, 2016.
For applications & additional information, write to
pinkdoorretreat@gmail.com
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Can trans women writers attend?
YES PLEASE. Our mission is to elevate and normalize the lived experiences of all trans and gender non-conforming writers of color who have historically been shut out of the social narrative. During the public reading, our lucky audience is exposed to poems and stories that compel them to want to take action or, at the very least, motivate them to examine their own ideas and beliefs. We are a very protective bunch, and check in with each other every day. Of course, humans are human, so sometimes someone will make a mistake, but we are here to assist in everyone taking accountability for how they speak to and show up (or don’t) for each other. Short version: WE HAVE YOUR BACK.
What if I was assigned “female” at birth but refuse to conform to society’s bullshit gender binary and use a gender-neutral pronoun? Can I attend?
Absolutely. And PLEASE. We are just as interested in hearing your story as we are in telling our own. This retreat is as much about empowerment as it is polishing that stunning voice of yours.
I’m pretty anti-social, but I really want to work alongside experienced writers. Do I have to be a kumbaya butterfly the whole time? NOPE! We understand the need for self-care. If you feel overwhelmed or desire some good old-fashioned solitude, we invite you to take a break. Go for a walk through the long grassy knoll, or take a bike or hike along the spectacular trail a few blocks away. There are also waterfalls and a gorgeous monument called The Seat of Remembering and Forgetting. And of course, there is an awesome Victorian cemetery nearby where Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass are buried. Oh, and lots of craft supplies if you feel like making a collage of all that’s buzzing in your head.
My diet is really restrictive. Will we be eating pie the entire time?
We always make sure we learn everyone’s allergies and preferences to create meals long before the retreat starts. Our onsite chef is a wizard and has accommodated vegan diets and writers allergic to dairy, gluten, strawberries, tree nuts, fish, lions, tigers, bears etc. There are numerous options for everyone at meal time, and always tasty snacks available in between each meal. I don’t have formal writing training. Does that matter? No. Through the application process, we are able to determine a well-balanced roster of beginning, intermediate and advanced writers to provide opportunities for both growth and leadership.
