Everything's Fine

by Cecilia Rabess

“What about the double standard for athletes and legacies!” Jess’s heart was pounding; she felt a little wild-eyed. “Isn’t that the outrage?” She searched the room—for what? For someone who might agree with her? That wasn’t going to happen. They would make their dispassionate arguments, and when class was over they would calmly pack their textbooks away and Jess would be the only one who’d felt like she’d been kicked in the teeth repeatedly.

This was why Jess hated Law & Society. It was always the same story: oppressed peoples, willful misrememberings of history, a whiff of white supremacy. Unlike calculus or economics, in which the professor silently scratched out the answers at the front of the lecture hall, and in which there was rarely controversy—unless someone got started on infinity!—in these liberal arts classes people insisted on shouting out their opinions, no matter how unseemly. It was a lot to endure for a couple of college credits. Yet here she was.

Their new friends, the Wine Girls, are sunny California optimists with trust funds and tangled hair whose parents grow grapes in the Napa Valley, who believe in free love and acupuncture and private space travel and electric cars.

The client has a certain slick quality to him and Jess can imagine him in sepia tones, a robber baron plundering America’s coffers for his own ill-gotten gains, or maybe just a common outlaw stealing copper from railroad tracks under cover of night. He goes on and on about price discrimination and profit maximization and he all but calls his customers suckers.

So they cross six lanes of traffic to get to the strip mall on the other side of the highway where, at the restaurant, people are lined up for hot dogs and spaghetti. Josh says, “Manhattan this is not.”

More than luxury macarons or designer shoes, she wanted one thing: for people to take her seriously. If she had a million dollars—that was her number—maybe people would stop assuming, that she had nothing to offer or that she wasn’t someone to be reckoned with or that she was a fucking secretary.

In the same auditorium where the secretary of the treasury recently gave a lecture, a pair of very earnest facilitators tries to convince the room that unconscious bias is real, while everyone stares at their phones. Eventually they open it up for discussion and the conversation unfolds so predictably that Jess wonders how many more times she will be forced to sit in a room having her intelligence insulted. She imagines having this conversation over and over again, forever, until she dies. Sitting in her wheelchair, in the retirement home, surrounded by people who will never stop asking why we must “lower the bar.”

“Jess,” he interrupts, “the hallmark of an agile intellect is the ability to continuously accommodate and integrate new information. To regularly and systematically update one’s mental model of the world. It’s the scientific method.” “So… you changed your mind?” “Yes.” “Why?” “Not one reason. But there have been a number of studies lately that kind of explicitly break down race and gender as being highly predictive of economic outcomes even when controlling for things like parental income and education. It’s… compelling.” “So you read a research paper and now you’re not racist?” He looks at her. “Ha, well that’s one way to frame it.” He swivels back to face his computer. “But for the record, I was never racist.”

“I think, yes, I believed then and I still believe—though maybe now I’d say it better, or differently—that the socioeconomic question is the more pressing one. I think the emphasis—on race, on ethnicity—of the current political discourse is misguided, pathological even, and misses a lot of opportunities to improve the economic situation for everyone, not just groups that we arbitrarily deem underrepresented or underserved, which, by the way, is always going to be a moving target and is always going to be a nonstarter in terms of garnering any meaningful bipartisan support.”

“Hear me out. Equality and justice are fundamentally economic problems and the more we get distracted by identity politicking and virtue signaling the less we actually accomplish in terms of addressing structural inequality. I honestly believe that most of the time liberals would rather be right than win. Their entire worldview is completely assailable, and I don’t think it makes me a bad person to want to advocate for an approach that actually stands a chance of working.”

They know she’s a decent trader because everyone knows she’s a decent trader. Although decent is, she thinks, an understatement. And actually a most obnoxious qualifier. They know because there are leaderboards, giant flat-screens at either end of the floor, that rank every single employee on the trading team. Gil, or someone senior, designed an algorithm that accounts for the size of each trader’s portfolio, the annualized returns and the absolute growth and then spits out a ranking, a number next to each trader’s name. At first Jess was turned off by it—it seemed needlessly cutthroat—but as her rank rose she decided she liked it. Because no matter how many eyes roll in the Ideas Meeting, or how many times Dano calls her by the wrong name, or how many people in the micro-kitchen stop to talk shit, it’s how Jess knows she’s good at her job.

Instead of an interview, they give her a take-home test. They send Jess a million rows of government data and ask her to come up with a headline and craft a narrative, using only charts and graphs. They say: the best visualizations create a synesthesia-like bridge between intuition and information. They give her three days to complete the exercise, and it takes her three days and an hour. She stays up all night working, it’s like calisthenics for her brain—it’s a little bit thrilling to use her powers for good—and when she is done with the analysis she sends back a headline that reads It’s Time to Talk About the Gender Pain Gap, along with a series of interactive graphics that model the economic impact of excluding women from clinical research trials. The email has barely left her out-box when a response flies back: We want you to come in and meet the team. We love your point of view.

Jess says, “It’s just, you and I, we’re so different.” He says softly, “But not in the important ways.” “I’m Black, you’re white. I’m liberal, you’re conservative…” Said that way it almost sounds like poetry. Opposites attract. The best kind of love story. But that’s not quite right. Or at least it’s not what Jess means. They’re not really opposites. More like two people playing for different teams. But Josh disagrees. “Jess, my love,” he kisses her knuckle, “you do know none of that matters?” If none of that matters, how to explain war and politics and all of history?

But it’s not just a hat. It makes Jess think of racism and hatred and systemic inequality, and the Ku Klux Klan, and plantation-wedding Pinterest boards, and lynchings, and George Zimmerman, and the Central Park Five, and redlining, and gerrymandering and the Southern strategy, and decades of propaganda and Fox News and conservative radio, and rabid evangelicals, and rape and pillage and plunder and plutocracy and money in politics and the dumbing down of civil discourse and domestic terrorism and white nationalists and school shootings and the growing fear of a nonwhite, non-English-speaking majority and the slow death of the social safety net and conspiracy theory culture and the white working class and social atomism and reality television and fake news and the prison-industrial complex and celebrity culture and the girl in fourth grade who told Jess that since she—Jess—was “naturally unclean” she couldn’t come over for birthday cake, and executive compensation, and mediocre white men, and the guy in college who sent around an article about how people who listen to Radiohead are smarter than people who listen to Missy Elliott and when Jess said “That’s racist” he said “No, it’s not,” and of bigotry and small pox blankets and gross guys grabbing your butt on the subway, and slave auctions and Confederate monuments and Jim Crow and fire hoses and separate but equal and racist jokes that aren’t funny and internet trolls and incels and golf courses that ban women and voter ...

Love conquers all, except geography, and history, and contemporary sociopolitical reality. Dax found their conclusions depressing, but to Jess it was all strangely cathartic.

It rings and rings and she holds her breath. But then he picks up. He says, “Hello, beautiful,” and she feels it happening, something tight in her chest unraveling, not forgiveness, or acceptance, but something closer to recklessness. A champagne bubble of excitement blooming in her chest. A feeling, a memory maybe, of warmth, of pleasure. She has been so sad, so despondent. And now, she’s certain, she’d rather be happy than right. Besides, it’s not like they’re getting back together, it’s just talking.

Don’t tell us you agree with him, they say, and it feels like a dare. So Jess tells them, actually, it’s something in between. She tells them that rent control is a nice idea, but not if it isn’t means-tested. She tells them, Otherwise, you just end up with a bunch of random old man sculptors paying two hundred dollars a month to live in ten-thousand-square-foot lofts. She tells them, You know what, actually, it’s kind of fucked up. It’s not fucked up, they tell her. Artists are the lifeblood of New York City! They explain that the city is sliding toward inexorable decline, devolving into a late-capitalist hegemony run by Russian robber barons and Chinese billionaires, with their shell companies and Gucci handbags and spoiled children, buying up all the real property. They buy whole buildings at a time just to launder their dirty money, and these buildings, they don’t ever occupy them. It’s killing the culture of the city. It’s sapping the life out of it. Jess thinks, Russian robber barons and Chinese billionaires, did they forget to mention the California trust fund kids?