Before we delve into the posts we’re reading and loving elsewhere on the internet, don’t miss E. Young’s piece on the Afropunk Festival, which sparked some lively discussion!
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‘The Disappeared‘ (Hannah Dreier for ProPublica)
When people from marginalised groups disappear, they hardly make a ripple.
Many of the families came from countries where officials have historically looked the other way as gangs and death squads disappear young people. Now they felt the same pattern was playing out again, in the woods of Long Island. The officers they asked for help dismissed their children as runaways instead of crime victims, and they repeatedly failed to provide interpreters for witnesses and parents who only spoke Spanish. Their experience points to a larger breakdown between the Police Department and Latino immigrants. Too often, Suffolk detectives acknowledge, police have stereotyped young immigrants as gang members and minimized violence against them as “misdemeanor murder.”
‘I tried to live according to Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. Here’s what happened‘ (Maura Forrest for the National Post)
Jordan Peterson is a wild dude. How wild?
I did not know where I would end up at the start of this, but I can safely say I didn’t think it would be here. I cannot despise Jordan Peterson, as I thought I might. I’ve spent time with some of his followers and I appreciate what he’s done for them, and what, to some extent, he’s done for me. But I won’t embrace him as they do. I can’t. Because I fear that on some level, Jordan Peterson despises me.
‘What Do We Owe Her Now?‘ (Elizabeth Bruenig for the Washington Post)
This intimately-reported piece explores the aftermath of a sexual assault, and what it did to a community.
Yet despite the fortune of a happy life, I found it difficult, over the ensuing years, not to think about what had happened that August. I still remembered the taste of summer there, and the pregnant threat of storm clouds, among which flashes of lightning pulsed like veins of silver, and the sense that youth meant collecting inklings of things I couldn’t fully know. One of them was the impression I had gained that year, that vulnerability sometimes begets bloodlust and revulsion, even in seemingly ordinary people. Another was the sense that the damage that follows litters the underside of society, beneath the veneer of peace.
‘Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s Battering Ram‘ (Paige Williams for the New York Times)
Know your enemy!
Sanders worked on all seven of her father’s political campaigns. When Huckabee appeared at the Hope Watermelon Festival or the Gillett Coon Supper, she went along. “I’m a total daddy’s girl,” she once said. Huckabee opposed gay marriage and condemned abortion. Yet for some Republicans he wasn’t conservative enough. As governor, he created a health-care program for children, and favored legislation allowing high-achieving immigrants, regardless of their legal status, to apply for a state-funded college scholarship. But, whereas Democrats attributed crime and poverty to inequality and to educational failures, Huckabee blamed “the selfish decision to ignore God’s standards of integrity.”
‘And You Thought Trump Voters Were Mad‘ (Rebecca Traister for The Cut)
2018 may go down in history as the year of female rage, but it’s not unique.
The idealized vision of what this country might be was born of the virtuous, and sometimes chaotic, fury of the unrepresented. We are taught it as patriotic catechism — give me liberty or give me death; live free or die; don’t tread on me. We carve our Founders’ anger into buildings, visit their broken bells, name contemporary political factions after the temper tantrums they threw, dressed in native garb, dumping tea in a harbor. We call these events a revolution.
Photo: Susan Fernandez