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Would it change her? Back in her childhood she used to have holy feelings, knifelike flashes that laid the earth open like a blue watermelon, when the sun came down to her like an elevator she was sure she could step inside and be lifted up, up, past all bad luck, past every skipped thirteenth floor in every building human beings had ever built. She would have these holy days and walk home from school and think, After this I will be able to be nice to my mother, but she never ever was. After this I will be able to talk only about what matters, life and death and what comes after, but still she went on about the weather.
One thing I remember doing at that age is reading every magazine and every journal all the way through. I didn't think to skip things because I felt I didn't know enough yet to be allowed to skip anything. [...]
hahhaha i still do this (and i feel guilty when i mark something as "read" on goodreads without having read all the way through)
[...] I read like five male coming-of-age novels that had intense, long passages about masturbation. These books taught me a lot about what it must be like to be a young man, and gave me some terrible ideas about the kind of woman I didn't want to be, in order to not be thought dull or needy by the intelligent, masturbating young men I liked, but they did not help me understand my life. [...]
[...] These were the books that were handed to me, and so I thought, this is something that I have to get used to. I knew that if I had been a young man, I would mimic these novels too. The realization that there were parts of that acting out that I didn't get to do, solely because of my gender, and other parts in which my acting out was seen differently, not as fun but desperate, was devastating. I can't even explain how devastating that was. I couldn't even think of the ethics of any of it because all I saw was the role I was confined to in those stories. I can't think of a book that I would've given myself that would've armed me against that feeling. I got really mad at the books. I remember getting mad at a boyfriend who had lied and saying, "YOU THINK YOU'RE THE HERO OF A FUCKING UPDIKE NOVEL." But it was my role I resented, the role of the bovine female, while he was the Julian Sorel, the deceptive, neurotic, charmingly flawed hero balancing competing claims for this affection--again, the bearer of narrative.
on Roth
I think because it seemed hard, and because it seemed comfortingly objective. I had gotten myself into this incredible existential funk as a child about moral relativity and animal rights-- I had a crazy animal rights and environmental magazine was pathologically invested in it, and also completely convinced that I was going to start a revolution among young people, like other 10- and 11-year-olds. But when I went to public high school I realized that not everyone agreed with me. Everyone wasn't a crazy hippie. I thought, "How do I know I'm right and everybody's wrong?" And so I turned to the sciences. It's also where you get that feedback loop, academically: positive reinforcement, good grades, stuff like that, and it's so easy to climb. That was something completely new to me, having grades, having gold stars. I got into that.
on why she wanted to study physics at Brown. i love this. v relateable
This relates to something Elif said at the beginning, about how as an aspiring writer she believed she should not read novels in order to be a real, creative genius. I love my influences, but I would advise people to be more like young Elif! Protect and cultivate and trust your untrammeled instincts a little bit, just for fun.
Part of the legacy of people like Ella Baker and Septima Clark is a faith that ordinary people who learn to believe in themselves are capable of extraordinary acts, or, better, of acts that seem extraordinary to us precisely because we have such an impoverished sense of the capabilities of ordinary people. If we are surprised at what these people accomplished, our surprise may be a commentary on the angle of vision from which we view them. That same angle of vision may make it difficult to see that of the gifts they brought to the making of the movement, courage may have been the least.
Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom
epigraph ... beautiful
Today’s service worker has a radically different relationship to the consuming public than last century’s manufacturing worker had. People buying a car don’t meet and confer with the workers whose hands create it; they don’t walk up and down the assembly line insisting that a tweak this way or that might make a better ride. But parents picking their kids up from school often meet with the people who spend more waking hours with their kids than they do: the educators who are helping their children prepare intellectually and socially for adulthood. And parents participate in the educators’ production process, attending meetings and volunteering in the classroom. Similarly, nurses and other health-care workers charged with repairing the victim of a car crash are in constant contact with the family, who are also allowed in the workplace, that is, the patient’s hospital room. The case studies in the following chapters are filled with evidence that these mostly female, multiracial service workers are as capable of building powerful organizations as they are of building a child’s mind or rebuilding a patient’s body. In fact, they are among the only workers today engaging in production-shuttering strikes. Their organic ties to the broader community form the potential strategic wedge needed to leverage the kind of power American workers haven’t had for decades.
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Most CIO organizing was based on a mass collective action, high-participation model anchored in deep worker solidarities and cooperative engagement in class struggle. Strikes, the kind that could shut down production—strikes in which most if not all workers walk off the job in a high-risk collective action—were routine, and were evidence that workers themselves were the primary agents of their own liberation. “Left” organizers, those associated with various socialist and radical factions, flocked to the CIO because of the principal of inclusion, of uniting all workers across ethnicity, gender, race, skill level, and every other working-class division. The AFL had had a long, complicated history not just of excluding semi- and unskilled workers, and Black workers, but also of having taken positions against European and then Asian immigration, and very narrowly limiting the union struggle to wages and working conditions.
The CIO’s left organizers were intensely committed to recruiting and building power across the many “isms” and other divisions among the working class, and they had to develop special methods to do it. Jack O’Dell, an organizer for the CIO and later for the civil rights movement, recalls their success: “I grew up in Detroit, and when people asked you, ‘What union are you in?’ the guys didn’t even say their union; they just said, ‘the CIO.’ Especially black workers, because the CIO would take on racism.”
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One left-led union they discuss is also the subject of Howard Kimeldorf’s Reds or Rackets? The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront. Kimeldorf analyzes the stark differences between two mostly male dockworkers’ unions, one on the East Coast and the other on the West Coast, that developed during the same period, the era of the CIO. On the East Coast, where workers and their leaders fought chiefly for money and other material gains, official corruption became legendary; bribes served to buy off the Eastern unions for decades. On the West Coast, where the unions fought for control of production, that is, for the right to negotiate rules governing safety, hours, and similar issues, bribes didn’t work: Money wasn’t what these workers were looking for. The West Coast’s Wobbly-inclined base produced a leader, Harry Bridges, who was openly a socialist. Bridges and the West Coast workers routinely engaged in strikes; they had to; their demands were substantial and the employers weren’t easy to beat. Kimeldorf concludes that the endless class struggle in which the West Coast workers engaged resulted in high-quality contracts that cemented a high level of participation, active membership, and a strong relationship between the rank and file and the union leaders. He demonstrates that this left-wing leadership showed superior skill in every aspect of running a union, and notes that members routinely reelected socialists to leadership positions, even though their own politics were not uniformly left-wing, but instead quite diverse.