View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
In this literature, “antiblackness” is a technical, not a subjective or impressionistic, term. It does not refer to prejudice or dislike, as might easily be supposed. Rather, it is used to capture the idea that an underlying racial antagonism can come to structure the social fabric of a given society. Race, in this description, operates like a function that overdetermines outcomes and relations between people regardless of any particular actor’s personal disposition or attitudes. It says that there are disparate and antagonistic sets of what Durkheim would call “social facts,” matters of objective analysis about the relative position of power, and more importantly even, of value, that inhere in populations that are racially marked and bounded. The racial fault line is therefore not a regrettable byproduct of behaviors that can be reformed or improved over time; it is not like a tumor that can be excised from the body politic. On the contrary, it is a necessary and even vital ingredient of the social order, a division that pulls two socially defined groups apart but simultaneously binds the larger edifice of society together like mortar in between bricks, holding them in place. Let us call this the “structural antagonism thesis.”
The tech takeover had begun before Mitty moved in. She was used to the reality of surf spots teeming with millionaire tenderfoots, their ordinary brown hair eagerly doused with lemon juice. The way they paddled toward barreling waves in the middle of a thunderstorm, then retreated to their freshly built homes on the edges of eroding cliffs. Brazen and brilliant and believing that nothing could kill them. When Mitty arrived, she was less familiar with the time that Bethel yearned for, a previous century that Mitty, like most teenagers, associated with the stories that elderly people insisted on telling, stale and memorized. She often confused her decades, not entirely sure how the forties felt any different from the fifties beyond some vague sense that World War II and the James Dean craze didn’t overlap.
He didn’t ask her many questions, but he didn’t talk about himself much either, which made Lena feel at ease, like he was neither consumed with trying to figure her out nor trying to make her understand him. He talked about the ever-widening class gap that had progressively managed to ruin a city that was once home to outcasts and dreamers. One of the few times he used the word I was when he implicated himself in that evolution, admitting that he, too, was a part of the tech industry that corrupted San Francisco, though he never quite explained whether or not he forgave himself for it.
He made her a Negroni and sprinkled orange wedges with sugar. He opened all the windows and they sat on the floor, where he grew wistful as he described how the city used to feel invigorating and chaotic and full of potential. He told her about wanting to leave for somewhere smaller, somewhere stuck in its ways. Somewhere without billboard ads for cryptocurrency looming over the freeway. Somewhere uncool with bad food. Lena gently suggested that there were other parts of the city that hadn’t yet been overrun, but he wasn’t convinced. We’re everywhere, he said. I wanna go where there’s less of me.
lol
He noticed things about her that seemed trivial; then he explained why they were actually useful. The fact that her ability to taste the dash of cinnamon in her drink meant she had an advanced palate. That, based on their wrestling match on his glossy concrete floor, her strength-to-weight ratio meant she’d be a natural rock climber. Her vision was insane, which, among other things, would make her a fantastic bird watcher. She liked how he made her feel, like she was capable. And more than that, like she was remarkable. He was more passionate about her potential than her past. It was rare to find that in a man, she thought, someone who doesn’t feel threatened by all the things you could become.
She can hardly remember her life before Sebastian, or what it was like to exist without him as a fact of who she is. There is only one small difference between then and now that becomes clear whenever she lets herself fold into the past, something that has since gone away. The morning after that first night together, when she stepped out of Sebastian’s front door, she was perfectly content to leave. She had readjusted her dress, her underwear stuffed into her purse, and, on the bus back home, basked in how excited she was to just go off and miss him. Now there is no time to miss him. That day was the last time she remembered being at any sort of monumental crossroads. She had so many choices then. These days, it seems, there is only one direction to go.
When they reach the dollhouse, the man lifts their boards onto a rack in the yard, while the woman stares at the ocean. Mitty feels gluttonous, getting to look at her without restraint. Her posture, pulled tight. The way she gathers her hair to twist it up and away from her neck in one seamless motion, as quick as a string trick.
Mitty’s mother used to say that blaming beauty on genetics is just an excuse to quit. Beauty is about what you distract from by way of what you accentuate, she’d say, conjuring a waistline with a belt. Once you figure out what you don’t want a person to notice about you, you can make everything else louder.
What strikes Mitty about her neighbor is that it seems she is doing neither—accentuating nor distracting. The wetsuit seems obedient to the curves of her body—calves sloping to a fragile ankle, the bight of her lower back. Nothing about her is flattened by neoprene.
She stares at her naked body in the mirror. She should be satisfied, having discovered nothing wrong. But instead, she feels empty. She knows how other women talk about their bodies with a painful degree of focus. She’s heard them cry about aging as though it were a thief that came in the night and took away everything they were born with, everything they’d fought for. She has seen the way they brawl with their bodies, buffing their limbs with exfoliating gloves and training their stubborn shapes to behave, first at the gym, then by scalpel if the cardio doesn’t take. She understands why beauty feels like something worth guarding for those women. They’ve earned it. But Lena has never worked for her body. She’s never silently begged for anything about herself to change; not really. It just feels like her body arrived one day, then stayed that way, the same year after year. Maybe, she thinks, if she did find something wrong, it wouldn’t be all that bad. Maybe then her body would feel like her own.
What must it feel like to be so aligned with the fact of your beauty, Mitty thinks, that you assume the questions you ask will be answered, the invitations you make will be accepted, the strangers you bother will celebrate your interruption? The thought makes her want to say no, on the sheer basis of disrupting any presumptions Lena might have about what she deserves. But as she studies Lena’s guileless face, she can see clearly that the woman in front of her isn’t self-assured. She’s eager in a way that Mitty struggles not to feel endeared by. She looks back to Bethel, who gives a gentle nod, then steps to the side and gestures for Lena to come in.
Sebastian says gym equipment makes him feel like a hamster sprinting along an infinite wheel. He hates all the mirrors, the caustic smell of sweat and all-purpose cleaner, the fact that everyone is wearing headphones and immersed in their own little vanity projects without speaking to one another. He prefers to utilize the natural world.
enjoying the use of 'utilize' here