David Michael Newstead's Blog, page 110
July 3, 2016
Strange Fruit in America
By David Michael Newstead.
80 years ago, an English teacher in New York named Abel Meeropol wrote the anti-lynching song Strange Fruit later immortalized by Billie Holiday. Meeropol was also known for writing the patriotic Frank Sinatra classic The House I Live In and later for adopting the orphaned sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg after the couple was executed in the 1950s. And while Abel Meeropol passed away 30 years ago, his most famous work lives on as a powerful response to racism in America. Today, I’m joined by Robert Meeropol to discuss his adoptive father’s legacy, the contrasting truths of American history, and if we’ve really made progress since Strange Fruit was first written.
David Newstead: So, I learned about a lot of this from the Joel Katz documentary about Strange Fruit. I saw it as an undergrad and I had heard the song Strange Fruit prior to that, but I had no idea about the history behind it at the time. And that’s really stuck with me over the years.
Robert Meeropol: Joel took something like five or six years to make that film. One of those typical independent efforts that have problems because of lack of funding. That documentary came out in 2002 and it holds up very well. I’ve seen it shown to audiences within the last two years. And it’s not really out of date. Although it doesn’t capture what I consider the major renaissance of Strange Fruit that has really occurred in the last five years.
David Newstead: Say more about that. What renaissance is Strange Fruit having now?
Robert Meeropol: I always think of Strange Fruit as sort of bubbling beneath the surface. It was gaining cultural importance and prominence starting really in the mid-1990s with Cassandra Wilson’s debut album, which is one of my favorite versions of Strange Fruit. There was a book written about Strange Fruit in 2001 by David Margolick called Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song. But really the thing that changed the most in recent years is in the summer of 2013 Kanye West sampled the Nina Simone version as she sang “Blood on the leaves, Blood on the leaves” as he complained about the hassles he was having with his ex-girlfriend. I mean, Abel Meeropol would have turned over in his grave!
David Newstead: Not exactly the same context.
Robert Meeropol: Yeah, not exactly the same context. And it sparked an internet furor over his use of Strange Fruit and everyone started talking about Strange Fruit and Nina Simone. The result was that all of a sudden there was an explosion of people covering the song. In November 2013 I believe it was, there was even an episode of Criminal Minds entitled Strange Fruit in which they were dealing with a lynching. It was around that time that people in various newspaper articles referred to Trayvon Martin’s killing as someone Strange Fruiting somebody, using it in that matter. So, it’s kind of permeated the culture. And then, with Black Lives Matter and various other things going on, it’s just everywhere.
If you have a Google Alert on Strange Fruit as I do, you will find that every day somebody is doing something whether it’s a dance performance or an art exhibit or you know Audra McDonald winning all sorts of awards for her performance as Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill. All that. It’s everywhere. In fact, the last time I saw a reference to it was last night on TV when Billy Crystal mentioned it at Muhammad Ali’s funeral. It is everywhere.
David Newstead: The last time I recall hearing it was during an episode of the Amazon series The Man in the High Castle.
Robert Meeropol: I haven’t watched the series, but I know that it’s been shown on that. Isn’t that about the Nazis winning the war?
David Newstead: Yes. In the show, the Nazis took over the East Coast and the Japanese took over the West Coast. And at some point, one of the characters walks by a record player that’s playing an old Billie Holiday album from 1939. But you know, obviously it’s a very dark show if it’s about Nazis winning World War Two. But Strange Fruit is applicable in a horrific alternate reality. It’s applicable in this reality. So, that’s a lot of crossover ability. I’m curious why you think the song has resonated for so long in so many different forms?
Robert Meeropol: Well, there are probably many reasons. But one is because racism is with us. Things have not changed enough since the song was written to make it out-of-date. That’s the sort of socio-politics of it in the grand scheme of things.
But if you want to look at it from an artistic perspective, I think the allusion of lynched bodies being strange fruit was so powerful that it seeped under the skin of the culture. Even when the song was suppressed particularly during the 1950s. So, it was kept beneath the culture’s skin. But as I’ve written, it seeped out its pores as time went on. And that’s the artistry of it. I mean, why is it that a certain painting lasts for centuries and another disappears? Why is it that a certain song, even one that’s incredibly popular, lasts for a year and then disappears? And others just go on and on? Well, it’s the power of the art and how it resonates with us. I think there’s an element of mystery in that. I can’t say that I can deconstruct it in a manner that rationalizes all aspects of it, but its longevity is a testament to its power. So, there’s that artistic component to it.
I think also because of the nature of the song – the political nature of the song. And this is one of the things that I try to point out and that I feel that a lot of people miss in referring to Strange Fruit particularly the mainstream media and people who I don’t think are particularly in tune with the politics of the song. I’ve seen it referred to as a sorrowful dirge. I’ve also seen it referred to as a protest song. In fact, you know Time magazine named it the Song of the Century in 2000 when it came out with its millennial issue. I don’t put much stock in these lists. You know, the greatest novels ever written. The best rock n’ roll songs of the last hundred years. Blah blah blah. But I’ve seen lists of the greatest protest songs and Strange Fruit always makes it into the top ten.
So, it is a protest song, but I think that misses the core of what Abel was doing with the song. And that is that it was an attack song! It was an attack upon the perpetrators of lynching and that is what infuriated so many people. That’s why it was banned. That’s why there were riots. That’s why Billie Holiday and others got in trouble for singing it, because they were attacking the phoniness and the hypocrisy of the supposedly genteel South. And ridiculing it in a way, saying the people who were involved in lynching were rotten to their core. That was totally unacceptable to be used in that matter at the time. So, that’s another reason why the song’s lasted. Because as an attack, it is something that allows people who’ve been discriminated against to fight back. And I think that’s one of its sustaining characteristics.
David Newstead: It seems like in a historical context, there’s a real element of risk in that for Abel Meeropol and Billie Holiday especially in the 1930s? I mean, this is years before the Civil Rights movement.
Robert Meeropol: I think so. I mean, it was groundbreaking at the time. People didn’t do that sort of thing. So, there were risks. There were risks all around. I mean, I can’t say I’m an expert on the life of Billie Holiday. But it’s generally believed that one of the reasons that she was hounded for her drug use was because she refused to stop singing Strange Fruit. You know, there was plenty of drug use among Hollywood celebrities and singers and the like in the 1930s and 40s, but only certain people were singled out. Those who refused to knuckle under and who sang songs that offended powerful forces were selected. I mean, the reality is that Billie Holiday died handcuffed to a hospital bed awaiting arraignment on a second drug charge. Whether that would have happened if she ever stopped singing Strange Fruit, I can’t prove it, but I believe that to be the case.
So, there was risk to her, tremendous risk to her. And part of the problem was that under federal law at the time, her first drug conviction and prison sentence prevented her from singing in clubs that served alcohol. You can imagine the problems that caused in her career. She was a club singer!
For Abel Meeropol, he was called before the Rapp-Coudert Committee in 1940, which was a kind of precursor to the House Un-American Activities Committee. And he was questioned. They were investigating Communist school teachers, which Abel Meeropol certainly was. I heard Abel talk about this when I was a kid and the committee questioned him, asked him if the Communist Party ordered him to write the song or if the Communist Party paid him to write the song. So, this was a cost to him as well. But he always found that kind of amusing – the idea that you could order somebody to write a song.
And I think one of the things that I find bittersweet about it all is that he died in 1986. And you know, as far as he was concerned his song was eclipsed. Nothing much had happened with it. Billie Holiday had claimed that she had written the music to it. She said she took a poem he wrote and set it to music, which, of course, was false. He wrote the words and the music. And so, here he was losing the ownership of a portion of his best creation. And people weren’t playing it. And yet now, of course, as often happens with artists 30 years later the thing is everywhere. And of course, it’s too late for him to appreciate how appreciated his work has been.
David Newstead: My understanding is Abel Meeropol wrote Strange Fruit after seeing a photograph of an infamous lynching in Indiana, is that correct?
Robert Meeropol: I believe so. To the best of our knowledge. And it’s the kind of detail that I feel doesn’t matter when you think about it. One of the things that we know about lynchings in that period of time is that postcards were made of them and distributed. There was actually an exhibit in New York City of all these postcards and it was quite a sensation two or three years back. There were lines out the door. You know, people were horrified by it, but they were also fascinated by this cultural phenomenon.
And I would also point out that Bob Dylan’s song Desolation Row starts with the line “They’re selling postcards of the hanging” and “The circus is in town”. That whole opening stanza is about what happened in Duluth, Minnesota in the 1920s. The circus came to town and hired black people from Chicago to do the construction and takedown. And the local workers were not given work as a result. And they went and attacked and lynched at least one of the black workers to demonstrate their displeasure. They created postcards based on that. And Bob Dylan wrote about it years later.
David Newstead: You know, several things come to mind like how widespread the KKK was in America during that time. Or you know, those photographs are also known for the bizarrely normal behavior of the white people in the crowd. But also, that lynchings weren’t just something that happened in the South.
Robert Meeropol: Well, I think that there is this presumption that it was just a regional problem. And while it was more prevalent in certain regions, it was certainly not confined to just one region. And you know from reading news reports, the sort of frat boy joking around about ropes and things is quite common to this day. It’s not so far beneath the surface.
Question from a Reader: I want to ask this question and then kind of shift gears. So, there aren’t lynchings anymore. But it still seems like we have public or publicly sanctioned violence against African-Americans and other people of color based on race. In your opinion, do you feel like we’ve actually come that far from when Strange Fruit was released? Because on one hand, I feel like we have and we haven’t, if that makes sense?
Robert Meeropol: That would be a good summary: we have and we haven’t. We don’t have these mass, public, officially sanctioned on a local scale torture and torment festivals that lynching represented through the 1930s and even into the 1940s. It was the 1950s and the Civil Rights movement that really changed that. But the Black Lives Matter movement has highlighted that lynching has in some ways taken on a new form. It’s covered up to a degree. It’s carried out more in secret, you know like police killings of young black men. But it still has a similar effect and serves a similar purpose of keeping a population down. So, I think that it’s not a qualitative change, but it’s a change.
David Newstead: Recently, a lot of people have been talking about the Stanford rape case and pointing out that the sentencing would have been much different if the rapist wasn’t an upper crust white male. Or I don’t know if you remember the Affluenza case a few years ago? But my impression of the justice system is that this is when they should throw the book at someone who is seemingly without remorse. But in both examples with white defendants, they got very lenient sentences compared to the huge incarnation rates among African-Americans.
Robert Meeropol: Michelle Alexander in her book, The New Jim Crow, pretty much highlights the disparate meeting out of justice along racial lines. Or I shouldn’t say justice, I should say punishment. And you know, the most obvious one is the difference between the sentencing for crack cocaine and powder cocaine. You know for using the same thing that has the same impact, you get a sentence that’s sixteen times longer. But also, there’s the overlying gender related issues and rape related issues that impact that Stanford case and that’s another aspect of it. But yeah, I wouldn’t disagree with you.
David Newstead: Going back to Abel Meeropol, I wanted to ask. He also wrote the Frank Sinatra song The House I Live In. This song is very different from Strange Fruit in terms of its tone and content. Knowing him, how do you explain the contrast between those two songs?
Robert Meeropol: First of all, there’s the Frank Sinatra version of The House I Live, which is probably the best known version which leaves out one of the verses. If you want to hear The House I Live In as it was originally written, you have to listen to the Paul Robeson version. And there’s another verse in there in which he talks about “My neighbors black and white”. In other words, it’s a desegregation line, which was controversial. And that was cut out of the Frank Sinatra version! In 1944, a short film was made with Frank Sinatra of The House I Live In. So, they cut out his verse about “My neighbors black and white”. And it’s supposedly this anti-racism film about combating antisemitism, but it turns out that it wallows in its own racism.
The funny story about that is when it premiered at a local theater. Abel Meeropol went to see the premiere. He was in Hollywood at the time. And when he saw that they cut out the entire second verse and removed the line “My neighbors black and white”, he got up and started yelling “They’ve ruined my song!” And he started saying “Shit! Shit! They’ve ruined my song!” And he was thrown out of the theater.
David Newstead: You’ve mentioned that this was a very introverted person who was not prone to doing that kind of thing. So, he must have been pretty unhappy about it?
Robert Meeropol: Oh, he was extremely agitated. Just so uncharacteristic of him, it was like a switch was flipped. But that said, you have to put The House I Live In in the context of the politics of the time. Abel Meeropol was a Communist Party member and he followed the politics of the Communist Party. And while he was not ordered or paid to write Strange Fruit, the Communist Party had a big anti-lynching campaign going on in the 1930s. So, his song was in tune with their politics. And then in the 1940s with the war going, there was a grand coalition of the left to fight the Nazis. His song, The House I Live In, was politically in tune with that united front. So, you put it in that context and I think that explains the difference. And he once said that The House I Live In was more about what America could be than what it actually was.
David Newstead: Keeping with The House I Live In and trying to relate that to current events, the song itself and that entire Frank Sinatra film have a strong message of religious tolerance. When I watched the film on YouTube, it was impossible not to think about recent efforts to ban Muslims from entering the United States or how people demonize immigrants and refugees at the moment. So, what’s your view of that? What do you think about it? What do you think Abel Meeropol would think about it?
Robert Meeropol: He would, of course, be appalled by it. I think that’s pretty obvious given his background. For me, there’s the contrast between multinational corporations being able to move effortlessly around the globe and extract the resources from Third World countries in order to benefit people in the First World. And contrast that with the fact that people are not allowed to move across borders. And that is a real sign of the priorities of the system. And in fact, I would say that the priorities are standing on their head. That’s what strikes me today about it.
I mean, we can all get exorcised about Trump banning Muslims from coming into the country. But Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State essentially banned Honduran women and children from coming into the country. As I’ve heard people say the kind of things that Trump proposes, Clinton has actually done. So, I’m not a fan of either one of them. And sometimes I think that the outrage at Trump’s verbal excesses – which are totally justified – cover up the fact that what is being done in a not-so-outrageous or public manner by leaders who are considered more proper is horrible as well.
So, I have mixed and complicated feelings about these things. But again, I think Abel Meeropol came from an era of less political nuance. So, I don’t know if he would entirely agree with the complexity of my analysis. But that’s hard to say.
David Newstead: Out of curiosity, do you know if Abel’s parents were immigrants?
Robert Meeropol: Yes, his parents were definitely not born in the United States. I am confident of that. He was born in the United States in 1903. His parents came from the Ukraine or what is now western Ukraine. In those days, sometimes it was Russia. Sometimes, it was Austro-Hungry. There was a shifting border area. And you know if you look at the last name Meeropol, there’s actually a town called Meeropol (Miropol or Myropil). But that’s in eastern Ukraine. But “opol” is very much Ukrainian if you think about Sevastopol and all the different names in that area around the Ukrainian conflict.
David Newstead: So, you said he believed The House I Live In is what America could be. In your view, is America in 2016 the country from The House I Live In or the country from Strange Fruit?
Robert Meeropol: That’s a good question. I think he would still see it on the Strange Fruit side. In fact in the 1970s, he wrote a parody version of The House I Live In. And I don’t remember the parody very well except for one line. In the original, it says “A certain word – democracy!” In the parody, it says “A certain word – hypocrisy!” And so he did not feel that we were going in the right direction as he aged. And I see no reason why he wouldn’t have continued with that belief.
And I think he would have had a lot of problems with identity politics, because it just wasn’t in his political universe. Like a lot of people of his generation, I think he would have had a lot of trouble with gay rights. In the 1970s, women’s liberation and that Second-wave of feminism hit and my wife and I were certainly very involved in it. He was sympathetic in a sort of economic way, but I think he was too old to change. But it’s also true that his wife Anne was a very strong personality and they worked as a team a lot in producing political reviews and things. So, he was not a virulent sexist, but he didn’t escape from the cultural norms that existed as he was growing up.
Though I want to say one thing to his credit. When Abel and Anne got married, she kept her own name, her last name for the first two years of their marriage. They felt it was wrong for the woman to have to take the man’s last name, that it wasn’t right. And what Abel said was that it just became too much trouble. In those days in the 1920s and 30s, it was just too much trouble to have two separate names. And they changed it after two years. But that showed that he did have some sense of those kind of things.
David Newstead: That sounds like… I’m not sure if you’ve ever seen the Civil Rights film The Butler. But because there’s this generational difference between the father and the son in the movie, there appear to be these large chasms. And later in the movie, you realize they’re more style differences than anything else. Not necessarily substantive disagreements between what the father and the son are pursuing.
Robert Meeropol: Yep. And we used to argue New Left and Old Left all the time in the late 1960s.
Question from a Reader: I teach History in the Austin School district, which claims the highest percentage of English Language Learners and minorities in the district. In class, I include a discussion over the fear of the Other. Is there anything you would say to these students in relation to their cultural experiences within the United States?
Robert Meeropol: The reality is that this country was built upon stealing another people’s land and committing genocide against them. And then, its economic prosperity at least in the 19th century was to a large degree built on the backs of slaves. And you put those two things together and how can you justify that? Well, the Native Americans have to be the Other. And African-Americans have to be the Other. So, you have two peers of Otherness that is at the core of nation’s success. And while it’s not generally acknowledged in the mainstream when you have that at your core, of necessity that’s going to be a powerful cultural component that’s not going to go away anytime soon.
Then, of course, there’s this sort of standard left-wing response, which is the people who run the show like to divide and conquer. If you keep the white workers fighting with the black workers, they won’t unite and fight against the bosses. That’s oversimplified, but you get the idea. So, you have this cultural component that has to do with both Native Americans and African-Americans. Then, you have this class component, which has to do with dividing the working class. But I don’t know that I’m telling this high school teacher anything that she doesn’t know already.
David Newstead: I saw an interesting PBS piece a month or two ago and it was about demographic changes going forward in the United States. And for people who are entrenched in the way things have been and the demographics of how things have been, there are changes coming down the way that if you have a problem with the Other you’re the odd person out.
Robert Meeropol: I mean, that’s responsible at least in part for the Trump phenomenon. It resonates with all the people who are terrified of becoming the Other themselves.
David Newstead: How do you think Abel Meeropol should be remembered? This year marks 30 years since his death in 1986 and I’m curious what you think his legacy should be?
Robert Meeropol: I think on a political level, he should be remembered for Strange Fruit. It’s clear to me that it was his greatest work, even though it’s less than a hundred words long. It’s the work that’s had far and away the greatest impact. So, that’s on a political or public level.
On a more personal level, I think he should also be remembered for he and his wife both adopting me and my brother. And the way that plays out is that there’s a certain congruous to having the person whose best known and most powerful work was an attack on lynching then going ahead and adopting the orphaned sons of people who he viewed as being legally lynched. That showed to me that he was that sort of a humanitarian not only in his head, but in his heart.
June 30, 2016
June 26, 2016
The Typewriter Inheritance, Recap
By David Michael Newstead.
Catch-up with this on-going series focused on my efforts to repair my grandfather’s old typewriter. Below are links to parts one through five of The Typewriter Inheritance. And stay tuned for more.
The Typewriter Inheritance, Part One
The Typewriter Inheritance, Part Two
The Typewriter Inheritance, Part Three
The Typewriter Inheritance, Part Four
The Typewriter Inheritance, Part Five
June 18, 2016
Fatherhood and Feminism with Nikki van der Gaag
By David Michael Newstead.
Last year, Nikki van der Gaag led a groundbreaking study on the world’s fathers after realizing they were absent from most research. This year, she’s honing in on fatherhood in specific regions and delving into the cultural context behind men’s involvement in their children’s lives. Today, Nikki van der Gaag joins me to discuss her research, gender equality, marginalized communities, and Ryan Gosling.
David Newstead: So, this June is the anniversary of the first-ever State of the World’s Fathers’ Report. In the time since its release, do you believe that that research has had an impact? And if so, how?
Nikki van der Gaag: Yes is the answer and far more than I thought when we set out to do this work. The whole thing came about because I was doing an evaluation of the global MenCare campaign. And it just struck me that there’s a State of the World’s Mothers. There’s a State of the World’s Children. I’ve been involved in several State of the World’s Girls’ reports. But there was absolutely nothing that looked at men. And we’d been looking at State of the World’s Mothers, because they have so little on fathers in there. So, I rang up Gary Barker and Gary as usual kind of got going. And we had a number of different meetings. And a number of us collaborated in putting it together.
I knew there was a space for it. I knew that issues around how you can get men involved in gender equality were coming to the fore and bubbling up in various different places. But I don’t think we had any idea it was going to have the impact that it did. And that’s always partly serendipity. But I think it’s partly that it’s an idea that people were interested in. And it’s now been translated into numerous languages. There’s been I think seven other fathers’ reports in different countries. So, I actually came back from Kosovo last week where I was at the launch of the State of the Balkan Fathers’ Report and there’s been one in Brazil. There’s been one in the Americas. There’s been one in Australia. So, it’s one of those ideas that kind of just took off. And I think people realized that it was an interesting idea and that actually more research was needed. But that it would have a kind of local and regional context as well as a global one.
So, I think we’re really pleased. I think we had eight launches last June in different countries. And you know, completely not expecting that. That just wasn’t what we were expecting. So, yeah. An idea whose time had come at that particular point I think.
David Newstead: Do you see the research better informing implementation of different projects? Or how do you see it going from research data to some sort of applied or scaled up version?
Nikki van der Gaag: I think it works both ways. I think what we were mainly doing was to look at where there was already work on the ground or research or policy and to try and influence both policy and implementation. So you know, being very clear for example that in so many countries it’s either prohibited by law or it’s not culturally acceptable for men to be present at the birth of their child. Provided that the mother wants it, which was an important proviso. But that many men wanted to do that and many women wanted them to be there too.
And research was saying that when they did do it and they were there and they were present helping during pregnancy, there for the birth, and there after the birth in many cases it really helped their relationships with their children as well as supporting their partners. So, you know that was an example of we’re building on research.
We’re trying to feed into policy. We’re trying to push in some cases at closed doors and in some cases at open doors. And I think in a sense looking at fathers is just part of the work that you’ve been looking at generally is looking at men’s involvement in gender equality. It’s kind of one piece of the jigsaw. One way in. And I think it’s a way in that people find easier than some of the other ways in perhaps. So, we’re hoping that it will influence both policy and practice on the ground in a number of different, very specific ways.
David Newstead: You’ve been working in this area for a while now. Is there something significant you learned from the report or from your subsequent research related to the report that you didn’t already know? Like did something stick out that was very surprising?
Nikki van der Gaag: I think the most surprising revelation was simply the fact of how little there was out there that was looking at fathers. You know, we had a lot of problems finding the research that we were looking for. And we didn’t realize it was going to be so difficult. So, I think that initial kind of thought that we need to see what’s out there and to make something of it was the biggest revelation as far as I was concerned. It wasn’t until I went through some of the mothers’ reports that I realized how much fathers were just absent.
And I think since then, I’ve kind of continued to keep an eye on the MenCare campaign. I’ve been involved in quite a lot of other projects where we’re trying to nuance that work on men and gender equality. And there are quite a lot of debates on how fatherhood is one way in, but actually doesn’t always address the more difficult questions around the involvement of men. So if you work with fathers, what does that actually lead to?
For example, in the Balkans last week we had this launch. They had done this lovely film of men looking after their babies and their children, which in a context of a society that’s very patriarchal it’s just not something that men do. And the young people had done this amazing play around a father and two brothers not daring to pick up their baby and not knowing what to do. So, they’re in a very different place than we might be in the United States or in the UK.
Fatherhood is a way of being able to think about what it means to be a man, because it’s often the point at which either gender norms get far more entrenched or actually it opens men’s eyes up to “Hmm, I want to be a bit different than this.”
For example, I was talking to men a couple years ago in the Dominican Republic who had come together, because they were worried about violence in their communities. They were concerned by violence against women, but they also had their own experiences of violence. So if they had a violent father, they didn’t want to be that kind of father to their own children. So, it’s about personal motivation and also about motivating others to change. And fatherhood is a good way into that, but it’s not the only way I think. That’s one of the things I’ve been pondering on in the last year. What we were doing was a global report. We’re now thinking about the report for next year where we’re going to look at fathers in more marginalized communities. And that kind of very popular word that I don’t like very much around “intersectionality.” That you’re not just a father, you’re also young or old or you come from an urban location or a rural location or a different class or different caste, etc. So yeah, I think we’re building on that work now. It was a start.
David Newstead: Can you give an example of a marginalized community that would be the focus of one of these reports?
Nikki van der Gaag: Very topical at the moment, young men who come as migrants or as asylum seekers and refugees to another country and how their own culture intersects or doesn’t intersect with that countries’ views of masculinity and what that means when they becomes fathers, for example.
David Newstead: Shifting gears some, I wanted to ask about your book. You wrote a book called Feminism and Men. And my question regarding that is – If there is a place for men in the Feminist Revolution, who embodies that role in the world right now? Like who should men be emulating basically?
Nikki van der Gaag: Ah, themselves! I mean, I’m slightly suspicious that there’s ever a perfect role model. We’re in a kind of culture where celebrities have a very big influence one way or another. Just one of the things I was reading this afternoon was a book, I Call Myself a Feminist: The View from Twenty-Five Women Under Thirty. And there’s actually a young man at the end writing who talks about the fact that his ideas on feminism were kind of triggered by Ryan Gosling. And I think that’s fine. I think that’s cool. I think you know that has a place, but actually we’re all our own people. We all have to come to this in a different way. So, I think within different communities there are people you might look up to.
I’m just thinking about some of the young men that I visited when I was in South Africa as part of the research for the State of the World’s Fathers. So, going to some of those fathers’ groups and talking to some of the very few male counselors who were also part of that project. I think there are people that you meet in your life as you go along it that you can take as role models at different periods of time. You know, for some people their own fathers’ are their role models. For some people, they are definitely not. But I think these days we’re all shaped by so many different factors. I don’t think there’s ever any one factor. Sometimes, it might be that you happen to read something. You know, you might happen to read David Newstead’s blog and that might trigger something in you that takes you to do something differently. But there’s never one particular thing I don’t think.
David Newstead: I was curious what work you’re focusing on now or what projects are going to be coming up in the near future for you?
Nikki van der Gaag: So, I’m continuing on my work with men and gender equality. I’ve just been helping the global MenEngage alliance with an e-dialogue that they did a couple weeks ago where they were trying to look at the issue of accountability and how can organizations and groups working with men on gender equality who are often women’s organizations, because the women in organizations often say we’ve got to work with men. But how can those people be accountable to women’s movement and to women’s groups? I think we had more than hundred people contributing from about thirty different countries. It was absolutely fascinating. So, I’m kind of continuing to do bits and pieces of that kind of work and to help with that.
I’m trying to clear the decks a bit, because I’ve been commissioned to write this very short book called The No-Nonsense Guide to Feminism. Which will have a strand about men and gender equality, but will look a little bit about where the state of feminism is internationally. So, I think it’ll be interesting for me, because I’ve mainly been focusing on men’s involvement for the last few years. So, it’ll be quite interesting to go back and look at the other side of the coin.
David Newstead: I realize you have much more research left to do. But internationally, do you feel good or are you wary about the state of feminism across the world?
Nikki van der Gaag: I think I generally feel good about it. I mean, I’m old enough to have seen it kind of come in different phases. Not so much the whole First, Second, Third-wave thing. But if I think about ten years ago and I said I was a feminist, everyone kind of took a step backwards. And now, it’s hugely contested. And there’s all this horrible stuff on the internet. I got some really nasty men’s rights comments when I did the Tedx talk. You know, there’s lots of trolling and stuff going on. But I think in some ways that shows that people are sitting up and taking notice and trying to work out what this means for them.
So, I feel hugely encouraged by the younger generation of both young men and young women who are either call themselves feminist or pro-feminist and who are genuinely in search of how they can contribute to gender equality. In every part of the world. I’ve visited lots of different countries in the course of my work and I always meet the most amazing young people. They don’t necessarily call themselves feminists, because feminist is also seen as a kind of western import. But they certainly would act in ways in order to support girls and women in terms of empowerment. No, I feel encouraged. Not unadulteratedly encouraged, but encouraged nonetheless.
David Newstead: Nikki, thank you for speaking with me today. Do you have any final thoughts?
Nikki van der Gaag: I think there are some interesting threads that I’m just sort of pulling out at the moment. I think whenever an issue becomes more popular like when you have campaigns like the HeForShe campaign or celebrities talking about feminism or about men and gender equality, there’s always going to be some backlash of one kind or another. And I think the women’s groups I talk to are worried about men taking over resources and spaces that are already kind of shrinking. But most of the men that I work with or I talk to are incredibly aware of that I think and are really trying to negotiate as I said with this e-dialogue the issue of accountability. So, I feel not only hopeful about feminism. I actually feel hopeful about the role that men will be able to play.
But I think one of the next steps need to be finding ways of working with men in more powerful positions. So, there’s some interesting work going on, for example, with religious leaders in different countries. I mean, we’re never going to persuade the Trumps of this world, are we? But there might be other men who actually do hold those levers of power whether at the international level or the national level or the local level who men can reach more easily than women can. So, I think the next step is reaching men who can actually change laws who actually have an influence. And that might be celebrities, going back to our earlier conversation. But it also might be politicians or business leaders or a whole range of different men who we need to persuade to buy into these changes.
June 16, 2016
State of America’s Fathers 2016
By David Michael Newstead.
There’s new research out today that shines a light on the wide-ranging issues affecting fatherhood in America. On one hand, the State of America’s Fathers 2016 discusses demographic changes and social progress, while also making specific policies recommendations to address the challenges that remain. Notably, the report underlines the need for paid family leave in the United States as both mothers and fathers struggle to balance the obligations of work and childcare. The need for criminal justice reform is also prominently featured as research shows the connection between astronomical incarnation rates and the negative impacts these have on America’s families, particularly people of color. To learn more about the State of America’s Fathers, check out the links below.
June 9, 2016
Politics and Social Media
By David Michael Newstead.
In this podcast, I sit down with social media expert Alan Rosenblatt for an in-depth discussion on the impact of social media in the presidential election and why 2016 might be a watershed year.
June 7, 2016
The Commissar Vanishes
By David Michael Newstead.
David King died last month. He was a British graphic designer famous for his collection of Soviet photographs and posters. King spent years amassing his collection, building a visual portrait of history like a jigsaw puzzle.
The only reason I know about David King’s work though is because I was wandering around a bookstore while I was in high school. I found myself immediately drawn to his book, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia, and it’s been on my bookshelf ever since.
On one level, The Commissar Vanishes is about Photoshop before there was Photoshop – where enemies of the state were airbrushed out of existence so often that an original photograph looked nothing like the multiple reproductions churned out after each purge. In many cases, Stalin was a constant presence, while the other people in the photo were at risk of being killed and then erased from history.
As if that weren’t Orwellian enough, the book also included defaced portraits of officials whose terrified friends and loved ones suddenly found themselves in possession of something illegal, something that had to be destroyed. The result being that victims’ photos were expunged both in public and in private.
But through his years of digging, David King was able to piece together the truth and show each iteration of the fabrications and the system that manufactured a cult of personality through statues, books, posters, photos, and paintings. Because of that work, his legacy is well-earned. David King was 73.
June 3, 2016
The Angry White Man Election
By David Michael Newstead.
Over the last few years, I’ve read a series of books and articles that all say variations of the same thing, each describing different aspects of the same phenomenon. The American economy is changing, but our ideas about manhood are not.
The discrepancy between the two has affected a large number of men who (at best) aren’t adapting to the new global economy and (at worst) are hostile to very idea of change. This trend is detailed in Hanna Rosin’s 2012 book The End of Men and the Rise of Women and most prophetically in Michael Kimmel’s 2013 book Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era.
So, when I read back over some of this material recently it was amazing to me how relevant it was to the 2016 presidential election. And not in a good way.
After all, anger is not a particularly rational emotion. And we are not having a particularly rational election year either. Instead, the hyperbolic insecurities of modern America are creating a toxic mix of whiteness and maleness, which were already prone to toxicity to begin with.
Where is all that going to lead? I don’t know. But sad to say, a sequel to Angry White Men is practically writing itself now.
Angry White Men: Author Interview
Angry White Men: A Book Review
