Spoiler Alert: If you didn’t watch last week’s episode of Scandal, do not read any further.
While Shonda Rhime’s “Scandal” has become a reliable source of Twitter water-cooler talk every Thursday night, last week’s episode especially touched a nerve, after this scene between our protagonist, high-powered problem-solver Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) and President Fitzgerald Grant (Tony Goldwyn):
“I’m feeling a little Sally Hemings-Thomas Jefferson about all this,” Olivia told Fitz, who looked about as stunned as many shows reacted online.
So what to make of this in a broader context? As the season finale approaches Thursday, Guest Contributors T.F. Charlton and Arrianna Conerly Coleman weigh in on this special Roundtable. Continue reading »
Presented by Guest Contributor Phuc Tran
I’m here today to talk about grammar, but not the “gotcha” grammar of split infinitives and the misuse of “whom” because frankly, I hate it when grammar is used to belittle others. I am here to talk to you how grammar is a tool, to be used like a pair of glasses. When employed at the right time, grammar can bring the world into sharp focus, and when used at the wrong time, it can make things incredibly blurry. And this all starts with the subjunctive. I remember talking to my dad about the subjunctive, and because he wasn’t a native English speaker, he didn’t understand all the nuances of the subjunctive. “Listen, Dad. You can say something like ‘If it hadn’t rained, we would have gone to the beach.’” And his response? “That’s a stupid thing to say. Why are you talking about something that didn’t happen?” (A staunch reader of non-fiction, my father has a similar opinion of fiction. “Why do you want to read books about people who never existed doing things that never happened?”)
Here’s a quick refresher of the subjunctive: in English, we have three moods: indicative, subjunctive, and imperative. If we use the indicative mood in writing or speaking, we view the verb’s action as factual: “I am talking at a TED conference.” And the subjunctive mood is used when we view the action as nonfactual: “I might shit my pants.” The imperative mood is used when we view the action as a command: “Bring me a change of clothes.” The subjunctive comprises all the nuances of non-fact: potentiality, possibility, and contrafactuality.
The subjunctive mood allows us to look into the future and see multiple, highly nuanced possibilities with just a little sprinkling of could’s, would’s and might’s. Similarly, it also allows us to look into the past, to envision a world that didn’t happen but could have happened. The subjunctive is the most powerful mooda time-space dream machine that can create alternate realities with the idea of “would have been” or “should have been.”
And within this idea of “should have” is a Pandora’s box of regret and hope.
Growing up in Pennsylvania as a Vietnamese refugee, I would sometimes think about what would have happened if my family hadn’t escaped Saigon in 1975. Would we have been imprisoned like my father’s cousin, who spent years in re-education camp being tortured and sentenced to hard labor, or would we have been killed like countless other South Vietnamese unable to escape that April? The night we were fleeing Saigon, my entire family–grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles–were scheduled to board a bus. As the bus was loading passengers to go to the airport, I begin crying, shrieking uncontrollably–so much so that the entire family decided to wait for the next bus. And as that bus pulled away, it was struck by artillery fire, exploded, and killed everyone on board. As a young kid, I thought a lot about our good fortune and about what could have happened. I didn’t know it then, but I was pondering things that my parents couldn’t ponder–all because of the English subjunctive. Continue reading »
by Guest Contributor Renina, originally published at New Model Minority
“When Too Blue,” aroncb
It has taken me nearly a year to deal with the suicide of my play little brother Matteo.
I felt like shit when I first learned the news, nearly a year ago. In fact, I just laid on the floor and cried. When I saw that I had a phone call from a 510 number late on a Sunday night, I knew something was wrong; no one calls me from home that late unless something is wrong.
The day after I learned he passed, I still taught my class, but I mentioned to my students that someone close to me died, someone who was around their age.
After teaching, I went to Ben’s with Jerm the Perm to eat wings. #NOTtheAppropriateAayofDealingWithaDeath.
Teaching my students that day felt odd because I was able to be there for them, but I wasn’t able to be there for my play little brother. It made me question the meaning of what I was doing. If I can’t help people from my home, Oakland, then what am I doing? I’ve held on to this ambivalence until I went to Oakland three weeks ago and formally grieved his death. Continue reading »
By Guest Contributor Jessica Luther, cross-posted from Speaker’s Corner in the ATX (scATX)
Lots of news outlets are reporting on Caroline Wozniacki stuffing her top and skirt with towels at a match this past weekend against Maria Sharapova. She did this in order to enhance her chest and butt so that she could imitate or impersonate Serena Williams. She did it supposedly as a joke.
In case there is someone out there who has never seen a picture of Serena Williams:
By Arturo R. García
It’s hard not to think of Jenni Rivera’s death Sunday without thinking of Selena Quintanilla and Ritchie Valens. Three Mexican-Americans dead, on the cusp of making more headway into the country’s overall pop-culture consciousness.
But the loss of Rivera’s voice doesn’t just affect her loved ones, her fans or the musical realm–social justice lost an increasingly important Latina as well. Continue reading »
808′s and Heartbreak Album Cover.
Went through, deep depression when my momma passed/
Suicide, what kinda talk is that?/
But I been talking to God for so long/
And if you look at my life I guess he’s talking back- Kanye West, “Clique,” Cruel Summer
As often as Kanye West talks about the state of his mental health, one would think that we’d be having a national conversation on mental health–kind of like the way we had a wave of conversations about domestic violence in the wake of the Chris Brown-Rihanna incident. Yet, in the four years since Kanye began talking openly about the depression related to the death of his mother and the dissolution of his romantic relationship with longtime paramour Alexis Phifer, the conversations have continued to be one-sided.
A search for “Kanye West and Depression” brings up surprisingly few articles and discussions. There’s a sterile AP article describing his initial comments, Cord Jefferson advising Kanye to go to a therapist on The Root, an MTV news article on his path to recovery, and Tom Breihan in the Village Voice distilling 808′s and Heartbreak down to “emo bellyaching” and a “album-length tantrum at his ex.” While Bassey Ikpi later argued to have some compassion for Kanye, it was one small plea in a sea of indifference and condemnation.
After four years of being open about pain and vulnerability, I’m starting to wonder if society will ever really hear him. Continue reading »
[W]hile obvious bias can’t be easily discounted, sometimes misdiagnoses are the unintended side effects of persistent cultural misunderstandings. [Jonathan Metzl, a psychiatrist at Vanderbilt University and author of the book “The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease”] argues that racial tensions are structured into clinical interactions long before doctors and patients meet in the exam room.In the early 1970’s a series of influential studies established the fact that people of color were often over-diagnosed with much more severe mental illnesses than their white counterparts. When psychiatrist miss the mark so consistently, one obvious side effect is that persistent — though perhaps less severe — mental illnesses often go untreated.
Metzl notes that black men are historically underdiagnosed with illnesses like depression, anxiety, and attention deficit disorder.
“There’s a mistrust of psychiatry that I think is very well-founded. In the 1960’s we see very clearly that psychiatric experts were pathologizing civil rights protests and particularly black power protests as being insane. And it’s very hard to turn around from that and say, ‘Oh no, we made a mistake, please trust us.’ If you have a history of pathologizing legitimate political protests as mental illness, you set conditions for mistrust on both sides.”
– From “Young, Depressed, and Of Color: Why Schools and Doctors Get It Wrong,” by Jamilah King, for Colorlines
Hisks via sxc.hu
Why is it so difficult to find good conversations about mental health? Especially when so many of us brush up against difficult situations that could define us or destroy us over the course of our lives?
I started thinking about this series last year when I watched a very good friend of mine go through a deep struggle with depression. She wasn’t the first person I knew going through that particular process, but she was the first person I was ever afraid for. Her mind was going to a dark place, and I was worried that she wouldn’t want to stay in this world for much longer. She’s still here, but it has been a long, rough process. I read and re-read the Ask a Model Minority Suicide archives, trying to find something that would help her. She already knew about the resources available–in fact, she knew much better than I did: the numbers to the suicide hotlines, the online support groups, the ways to keep on medication without health insurance. She knew how to navigate the system.
But it still wasn’t helping.
Around this time, I became more aware of how many of my friends were in some form of therapy or counseling: how some people became devotees of therapy and others found it lacking; how, as my friends and I get older, we realize exactly how much we’ve used various things to self-medicate. And how little we are told about taking care of all parts of ourselves.
But outside of planning a few interviews, I kept this series in the back of my head.
The only reason this series is finally seeing the light of day isn’t a good one: a little over a week ago, a work acquaintance sent an intent to commit suicide as the subject line of a bcc’ed email.
So, this series isn’t going to be perfect and planned. Maybe it doesn’t need to be.
Maybe it’s supposed to be a little raw.
Maybe it doesn’t need to be perfect to help someone.
I’ve got a few things I’m working on: a couple pieces, some interviews to set up, a public document to open. But, hey, we’re wide open. If you know of good pieces or have a resource or a story to share, send it to us at team@racialicious.com.
The Octavia Butler Book Club
(Click the book for the latest conversation) Feminism for Real – Jessica, Latoya, Andrea
Yes Means Yes – Latoya
Sex Ed and Youth – Jessica
OMLN
