thenation--2020-07-13--Defending One Brooklyn Brownstone Is Just the Beginning

“ This is very lovely , ” Imani Henry said , stepping out of the gate at 1214 Dean Street in Brooklyn .
Though it was past midnight , a crowd of over 30 remained of those who had gathered that night to defend the tenants of the building , in the Crown Heights neighborhood , against an illegal eviction .
“ A typical part of our lives is illegal lockouts , ” said Henry , the founder of Equality for Flatbush ( E4F ) , the anti-gentrification and anti-police-brutality organization that initially sent out a call to action .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the most they can do in that situation is make a call to 311 , the city ’ s government services line , and hope to be connected with a housing lawyer .
But that night was unusual .
Within three hours , almost 100 people assembled outside the house , demanding that the tenants be allowed to stay in their homes .
Even after a season under the threat of the coronavirus and a month of racial justice uprisings , this felt new—and , as one person at the blockade put it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ long summer.
” During the Great Depression , neighborhood eviction defenses like the one at 1214 Dean Street were common and organized .
In the century since , blockades have popped up now and then in cities across the country .
The Los Angeles Tenants Union reversed a lockout in May .
But as the few protections tenants have been granted during the pandemic expire , as many as 28 million renters are at risk of eviction in the next few months .
And in the six weeks since the LATU blockade succeeded @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the streets in anger at state racism , among other things , to little response from the government .
The combination of frustration and desperation took concrete form as a neighborhood turned its focus on a pair of gentrifying white landlords and the mostly black , mostly female , queer , and trans tenants they were trying to evict .
Xander Roos , a member of the Legal Aid Society ’ s housing unit , left his nearby apartment as soon as he got an e-mail about the action via the Crown Heights @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
He was one of the first people at 1214 Dean , arriving a little after 5 pm .
He informed the landlord—Gennaro Brooks-Church , who owns the building with his ex-wife , Loretta Gendville—that it was illegal to evict anyone in New York state without due process .
There were no marshals present , no record of a filing , and the courts were closed for new eviction cases .
Brooks-Church responded that it was not an eviction , and on social media , Gendville said the same thing ; they were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
As the crowd assembled , tenants told a different story : After months of threats and harassment , Brooks-Church and Gendville had shown up unannounced , children in tow , to threaten them , barging into the rooms of his young tenants .
Brooks-Church , a middle-aged white man , took over an empty room and spent the night .
Gendville laid hands on the tenants , misgendered them , and told her teenage daughter they were squatters .
Gendville removed the building ’ s Wi-Fi , telling the tenants they would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ when they would move out .
Someone ’ s mattress and other belongings had been taken away in a U-Haul , and more furniture had been put out on the street .
After a few hours of standing around , watching as Brooks-Church walked in and out of the house , people were ready for more than booing and hissing .
They went diving on their phones and surfaced with dirt .
The house , which was zoned for one to three units and listed on tax records as containing one , had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ left handwritten signs warning tenants not to let anyone from the City enter .
Unearthed were embarrassing quotes from interviews in The New York Times , past troubles with the law , negative Yelp reviews of the landlords ’ businesses , and scathing descriptions of their assets : In addition to a few more rental properties in low-income neighborhoods in Brooklyn , Gendville owns a local chain of yuppie children ’ s stores , yoga studios , and an infrared sauna .
People—other neighbors , tenants , and organizers—took up a megaphone .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the chaos and worry , the crowd ended up relying on one person , Danni Inman , a young local with long braids from a couple of blocks away .
( Inman uses “ they ” pronouns . )
Like many others , they went to the blockade after seeing it on Instagram .
“ I just came out to show support , ” they told me .
“ I ’ d been here two hours when they asked me to speak , and then I started speaking , and then at some @ @ @ @ @ @ @ After consulting with tenants and the other de facto organizers , they told the protesters to go inside , first inside the gate and up the stoop and eventually inside the house , where Brooks-Church was skulking .
Around 8:20 pm , the police showed up , apparently responding to Brooks-Church ’ s call .
The crowd ’ s anger was instantly redirected .
The chants of the last month soon turned into new ones as two officers went inside the building unmasked : “ No landlords , no cops !
All evictions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ acting as a go-between , reported that although the cops agreed the tenants had a right to stay , they wouldn ’ t make Brooks-Church leave—even though he was there illegally ( unless it ’ s an emergency , landlords have to give tenants reasonable notice of at least a day before entering their home ) , he ’ d attempted to lock tenants out ( a misdemeanor offense ) , and there were tenant allegations of assault .
“ We ’ ve just been shown that police don ’ t protect us @ @ @ @ @ @ @ told the crowd .
“ We ’ re seeing that right now in action.
” As the police van left , the organizers directed the protesters to go inside .
It ’ s legal if “ it ’ s a party , ” Inman said .
“ The tenants have invited us inside their home.
” And a reminder , over and over again , “ Do not touch the landlord.
” People entered , and to everyone ’ s surprise , Brooks-Church went out onto the porch .
People turned around , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ him out of the house .
He eventually retreated to his SUV and drove off .
The mood was jubilant .
Even when someone took the megaphone to remind the demonstrators that this was only the beginning , that it would be a wearying summer of eviction and harassment , people only seemed energized .
“ If we have this many people—even after the [ eviction ] moratorium is lifted—really good eviction defenses , the police do eventually leave , ” an organizer with the Crown Heights Tenant Union said , optimistic about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ even as she acknowledged that larger landlords would be harder to fight .
The closest comparison to the shared elation was in recent memory : the feeling , during a Black Lives Matter demonstration , when protesters would force the police back or deface a police van , a momentary return of power to the people .
As the protests grew less confrontational , that energy faded , although the conditions and frustrations that underlie them remained the same .
The success of the blockade restored that hope .
As Inman pointed out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for Black housing is fighting for Black lives .
“ I founded Equality for Flatbush because we ’ ve had six people shot by [ New York police ] since 2012 , just in our little hood of Flatbush , Crown Heights , Bed-Stuy , ” Henry told me .
Part of that effort involves anti-gentrification activism , which often means eviction defenses ; he had recognized someone at the blockade from another eviction defense in Bedford-Stuyvesant .
Henry is 51 and gentle-voiced , with long roots in local activism .
His experience @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
As he said , “ It ’ s clear they ’ re preying on younger people.
” After Gendville tried to forcibly enter the room of a tenant who was recovering from brain surgery , the person contacted E4F , which sent the e-mail to the Crown Heights Tenant Union and began posting on social media .
“ Our thing is public shaming .
Police and landlords , developers have no shame , so just shame them .
That ’ s been our strategy , ” Henry said .
As he spoke @ @ @ @ @ @ @ texting their friends , posting on Twitter , and alerting their Instagram followers to the landlords ’ other businesses .
Inman left a little after midnight , citing exhaustion and the need to prepare for a job interview the next morning .
( Like many people there , they had been laid off at the beginning of the pandemic . )
Someone led one more chant , quietly : “ We love you , Danni.
” A couple left and returned with coffee .
Someone else left and returned with cups .
Pizza @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cigarettes , and beer .
Looking over cases of water bottles , Henry mentioned wanting something sweet to drink .
Within 15 minutes , someone arrived with a tote bag full of cold Gatorades .
Henry peered into the bag with delight and said , “ I can ’ t stand Gatorade , but I ’ m going to have one.
” By 2 am , dozens of people remained , spread out over the sidewalk and stoop , quietly chatting and smoking .
Nobody from the landlords ’ team returned the next @ @ @ @ @ @ @ overnight and kept drizzling throughout the day , but nobody seemed to notice .
( A pile of donated umbrellas went largely unused . )
The blockade had turned into a mutual aid station and a cafeteria , with a canopy set up in an empty parking spot over a few chairs and three tables loaded with food .
The furniture the landlords had thrown on the street had been rearranged and repurposed , with a sofa propped by the building door for potential use as a barricade .
There was a medical @ @ @ @ @ @ @ disposable masks , hand sanitizer , and a diligent restocker .
Police brutality and the behavior of the landlords were connected in the minds of many of the protesters .
Em , an E4F activist , said , “ The whole moment that we ’ re in , calling for abolition of police and prisons and [ Immigration and Customs Enforcement ] , is tying into this right now .
We ’ re recognizing this wouldn ’ t happen if we weren ’ t in this shitty system where landlords can do shit @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cops who brutalize and kill us.
” A recent sit-in at New York ’ s City Hall intended to pressure elected officials to make significant cuts to the New York Police Department budget was an escalation from peaceful marches , but it failed .
The leaders at 1214 Dean Street learned from that demonstration that demanding help from politicians doesn ’ t get much better results than asking nicely .
State protection from displacement and gentrification would never come fast enough to prevent it from happening .
Over and over again , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ keeps us safe ?
Who fights for us ?
” As the cops arrived and left and Brooks-Church returned home , the answer was clear .
“ We keep us safe .
We fight for us.
” Whereas relying on scattered neighborhood assemblies to defend tenants from rich landlords and armed policemen might have seemed impossible a few months ago , at 1214 Dean Street , a mass of angry and frustrated people came together to do just that .
I asked Inman if they saw themselves taking a more active role in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Oh , absolutely , ” they said .
But first , “ I ’ ll be here tomorrow and the next day and the next day if I have to .
”

This article appears in the August 10/17, 2020 issue.
“This is very lovely,” Imani Henry said, stepping out of the gate at 1214 Dean Street in Brooklyn. Though it was past midnight, a crowd of over 30 remained of those who had gathered that night to defend the tenants of the building, in the Crown Heights neighborhood, against an illegal eviction. “A typical part of our lives is illegal lockouts,” said Henry, the founder of Equality for Flatbush (E4F), the anti-gentrification and anti-police-brutality organization that initially sent out a call to action. For most New York City tenants, the most they can do in that situation is make a call to 311, the city’s government services line, and hope to be connected with a housing lawyer. But that night was unusual. Within three hours, almost 100 people assembled outside the house, demanding that the tenants be allowed to stay in their homes. Even after a season under the threat of the coronavirus and a month of racial justice uprisings, this felt new—and, as one person at the blockade put it, like “the start of a long summer.”
During the Great Depression, neighborhood eviction defenses like the one at 1214 Dean Street were common and organized. In the century since, blockades have popped up now and then in cities across the country. The Los Angeles Tenants Union reversed a lockout in May. But as the few protections tenants have been granted during the pandemic expire, as many as 23 million renters are at risk of eviction in the next few months. And in the six weeks since the LATU blockade succeeded, millions of people have taken to the streets in anger at state racism, among other things, to little response from the government. The combination of frustration and desperation took concrete form as a neighborhood turned its focus on a pair of gentrifying white landlords and the mostly black, mostly female, queer, and trans tenants they were trying to evict.
Xander Roos, a member of the Legal Aid Society’s housing unit, left his nearby apartment as soon as he got an e-mail about the action via the Crown Heights Tenant Union listserv at 4:54 pm. He was one of the first people at 1214 Dean, arriving a little after 5 pm. He informed the landlord—Gennaro Brooks-Church, who owns the building with his ex-wife, Loretta Gendville—that it was illegal to evict anyone in New York state without due process. There were no marshals present, the tenants hadn’t been served with papers, and courts were closed for new eviction cases. Brooks-Church responded that it was not an eviction, and on social media, Gendville said the same thing; they were just getting rid of some bug-infested furniture.
As the crowd assembled, tenants told a different story: After months of threats and harassment, Brooks-Church and Gendville had shown up unannounced, children in tow, to threaten them, barging into the rooms of young tenants. Brooks-Church, a middle-aged white man, took over an empty room and spent the night. Gendville laid hands on the tenants, misgendered them, and told her teenage daughter they were squatters. Gendville removed the building’s Wi-Fi, telling the tenants they would get it back if they told her when they would move out. Someone’s mattress and other belongings had been taken away in a U-Haul, and more furniture had been put out on the street. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
After a few hours of standing around, watching as Brooks-Church walked in and out of the house, people were ready for more than booing and hissing. They went diving on their phones and surfaced with dirt. The house, which was zoned for one to three units and listed on tax records as containing one, had been illegally subdivided, and Brooks-Church had left handwritten signs warning tenants not to let anyone from the City enter. Unearthed were embarrassing quotes from interviews in The New York Times, past troubles with the law, negative Yelp reviews of the landlords’ businesses, and scathing descriptions of their assets: In addition to a few more rental properties in low-income neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Gendville owns a local chain of yuppie children’s stores, yoga studios, and an infrared sauna.
People—other neighbors, tenants, and organizers—took up a megaphone. Unsure of where to focus attention amid the chaos and worry, the crowd ended up relying on one person, Danni Inman, a young local resident with long braids from a couple of blocks away. (Inman uses “they” pronouns.) Like many others, they went to the blockade after seeing it on Instagram. “I just came out to show support,” they told me. “I’d been here two hours when they asked me to speak, and then I started speaking, and then at some point, I was in charge.” After consulting with tenants and the other de facto organizers, they told the protesters to go inside, first through the gate and up the stoop and eventually inside the house, where Brooks-Church was skulking.
Around 8:20 pm, the police showed up, apparently responding to Brooks-Church’s call. The crowd’s anger was instantly redirected. The chants of the past month soon turned into new ones as two officers went inside the building unmasked: “No landlords, no cops! All evictions have to stop!” Roos, acting as a go-between, reported that although the cops agreed the tenants had a right to stay, they wouldn’t make Brooks-Church leave—even though he was there illegally (unless it’s an emergency, landlords have to give tenants reasonable notice of at least a day before entering their home), he’d attempted to lock tenants out (a misdemeanor offense), and there were tenant allegations of assault.
“We’ve just been shown that police don’t protect us. They protect property,” Inman told the crowd. “We’re seeing that right now in action.” As the police van left, the organizers directed the protesters to go inside. It’s legal if “it’s a party,” Inman said. “The tenants have invited us inside their home.” And the protesters were reminded, over and over again, “Do not touch the landlord.” The crowd entered, and to everyone’s surprise, Brooks-Church went out onto the porch. People turned around, facing him and linking arms to keep him out of the house. He eventually retreated to his SUV and drove off.
The mood was jubilant. Even when someone took the megaphone to remind the demonstrators that this was only the beginning, that it would be a wearying summer of eviction and harassment, the crowd only seemed energized. “If we have this many people—even after the [eviction] moratorium is lifted—really good eviction defenses, the police do eventually leave,” an organizer with the Crown Heights Tenant Union said, optimistic about tenants’ chances in the coming months even as she acknowledged that larger landlords would be harder to fight. The closest comparison to the shared elation was in recent memory: the feeling, during a Black Lives Matter demonstration, when protesters would force the police back or deface a police van, a momentary return of power to the people. As the protests grew less confrontational, that energy faded, although the conditions and frustrations that underlie them remained the same. The success of the blockade restored that hope. As Inman pointed out, “Black homes matter.” Fighting for Black housing is fighting for Black lives.
“I founded Equality for Flatbush because we’ve had six people shot by [New York police] since 2012, just in our little hood of Flatbush, Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy,” Henry told me. Part of that effort involves anti-gentrification activism, which often means eviction defenses; he had recognized someone at the blockade from another eviction defense in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Henry is 51 and gentle-voiced, with long roots in local activism. His experience was welcome in an overwhelmingly young crowd. As he said, “It’s clear they’re preying on younger people.”
After Gendville tried to forcibly enter the room of a tenant who was recovering from brain surgery, the person contacted E4F, which sent the e-mail to the Crown Heights Tenant Union and began posting on social media. “Our thing is public shaming. Police and landlords, developers have no shame, so just shame them. That’s been our strategy,” Henry said. As he spoke, dozens of people behind him were texting their friends, posting on Twitter, and alerting their Instagram followers to the landlords’ other businesses.
Inman left a little after midnight, citing exhaustion and the need to prepare for a job interview the next morning. (Like many people there, they had been laid off at the beginning of the pandemic.) Someone led one more chant, quietly: “We love you, Danni.” A couple left and returned with coffee. Someone else left and returned with cups. Pizza eventually materialized, along with snacks, cigarettes, and beer. Looking over cases of water bottles, Henry mentioned wanting something sweet to drink. Within 15 minutes, someone arrived with a tote bag full of cold Gatorades. Henry peered into the bag with delight and said, “I can’t stand Gatorade, but I’m going to have one.” By 2 am, dozens of people remained, spread out over the sidewalk and stoop, quietly chatting and smoking.
Nobody from the landlords’ team returned the next day. It had rained a little overnight and kept drizzling throughout the day, but nobody seemed to notice. (A pile of donated umbrellas went largely unused.) The blockade had turned into a mutual aid station and a cafeteria, with a canopy set up in an empty parking spot over a few chairs and three tables loaded with food. The furniture the landlords had thrown on the street had been rearranged and repurposed, with a sofa propped by the building door for potential use as a barricade. There was a medical shelf with first-aid supplies, cloth and disposable masks, hand sanitizer, and a diligent restocker.
Police brutality and the behavior of the landlords were connected in the minds of many of the protesters. Em, an E4F activist, said, “The whole moment that we’re in, calling for abolition of police and prisons and [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], is tying into this right now. We’re recognizing this wouldn’t happen if we weren’t in this shitty system where landlords can do shit like this and they can rely on cops who brutalize and kill us.”
A recent sit-in at New York’s City Hall intended to pressure elected officials to make significant cuts to the New York Police Department budget was an escalation from peaceful marches, but it failed. The leaders at 1214 Dean Street learned from that demonstration that demanding help from politicians doesn’t get much better results than asking nicely. State protection from displacement and gentrification would never come fast enough to prevent it from happening. Over and over again, the crowd asked on Tuesday, “Who keeps us safe? Who fights for us?” As the cops arrived and left and Brooks-Church returned home, the answer was clear. “We keep us safe. We fight for us.” Whereas relying on scattered neighborhood assemblies to defend tenants from rich landlords and armed policemen might have seemed impossible a few months ago, at 1214 Dean Street, a mass of angry and frustrated people came together to do just that.
I asked Inman if they saw themselves taking a more active role in community activism in the future. “Oh, absolutely,” they said. But first, “I’ll be here tomorrow and the next day and the next day if I have to.”


thenation--2020-07-13--Why Do All These Racists Keep Working for Tucker Carlson?

Blake Neff graduated from Dartmouth in 2013 , and according to his school ’ s alumni magazine , “ never applied to any job he ’ s landed.
” Within four years of graduating , he was a top writer for Tucker Carlson ’ s nightly show on Fox News , the most watched cable news show in history .
Neff ’ s quick ascent was due to the fact that he plugged into the right-wing media network even as an undergraduate , when he wrote for The Dartmouth Review .
This storied publication , infamous for its incendiary pranks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ purpose of cultivating right-wing journalistic talent .
Just as the Review had earlier launched Dinesh D ’ Souza and Laura Ingraham , so it gave Neff an entry point that led to a job at The Hill , followed by work for The Daily Caller .
Carlson founded the Caller in 2010 and sold his stake in it only last month .
Carlson poached Neff from the paper in 2017 and brought him to Fox News .
Neff ’ s rapid rise in the world came to quick end on Friday when he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to a CNN report that the writer had a double life on an online chat room where he gave vent to open racism , misogyny , and homophobia .
In an extensive report by Oliver Darcy , it was revealed that Neff was a frequent poster on the site AutoAdmit , using the pseudonym CharlesXII , an allusion to an 18th century Swedish monarch Neff seems to have admired for his legendary aversion to sex and alcohol .
( In 2017 , when he was interviewed by a dating column at The Washington @ @ @ @ @ @ @ poison ” and said “ most of my hobbies allow me to escape women.
” ) As CharlesXII , Neff displayed a remarkable range of bigotries .
Just last week , he participated in a forum entitled , “ Would u let a JET BLACK congo n****er do lasik eye surgery on u for 50 % off ?
” ( The original title spelled out the offensive word . )
Neff responded in the forum , “ I wouldn ’ t get LASIK from an Asian for free , so no.
” In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Black doods staying inside playing Call of Duty is probably one of the biggest factors keeping crime down.
” He also made derogatory comments about gay men and repeatedly posted information about a Facebook acquaintance , whose appearance and personal life became a running target of mockery on the forum .
In firing Neff , Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott and President Jay Wallace tried to portray the writer as an aberration , a bad apple who had somehow wound up in an otherwise wholesome barrel .
“ We want to make @ @ @ @ @ @ @ condemns this horrific racist , misogynistic and homophobic behavior , ” Scott and Wallace wrote in a memo sent to staff on Saturday .
“ Neff ’ s abhorrent conduct on this forum was never divulged to the show or the network until Friday , at which point we swiftly accepted his resignation .
Make no mistake , actions such as his can not and will not be tolerated at any time in any part of our work force.
” The Left Needs to Reclaim Free Speech Just How Far Can Trump Go @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s bigoted posting was no accident .
Nor can it be easily separated from the work he did for Carlson .
Moreover , far from being a lone wolf , Neff is clearly only one of a large cohort of white nationalists who have worked for Carlson at The Daily Caller .
These writers naturally end up in Carlson ’ s orbit , since both the Caller and Carlson ’ s show promote white nationalism , albeit in terms much more euphemistic than online forums like AutoAdmit .
As CNN reports , “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ forum found its way on to Carlson ’ s show… .
In some cases , language Neff used on the forum ended up on the show.
” Neff and CharlesXII were not a case of dueling identities like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde .
Rather , CharlesXII was simply Neff writing in a forum where friskier language is allowed .
On Fox News he expressed the same ideas , just in terms permissible to family viewing .
There ’ s no difference in ideology , simply a difference in etiquette .
Nor is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In 2017 , the Southern Poverty Law Center argued that “ the Daily Caller has a white nationalist problem.
” It reported that the website had published Jason Kessler , whose contributions to the Caller were removed after he organized the infamous “ Unite the Right ” rally in Charlottesville where neo-Nazi violence led to the murder of an anti-racist activist .
During the time the Caller was publishing Kessler , the site ’ s deputy editor was Scott Greer , who was extensively photographed keeping company with such far-right groups as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Caller initially rejected criticism of Greer , but ended up severing ties with him when it turned out that he had written under a pseudonym for Radix Journal , a white nationalist publication founded by neo-Nazi Richard Spencer .
According to a report in The Atlantic , “ Greer expressed racist antiblack views and anti-Semitism in the Radix articles he wrote under the Michael McGregor byline , and disparaged other groups including feminists , immigrants , Christian Zionists , and the pro-life movement.
” Aside from Neff , Kessler , and Greer , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nationalist ties have written for The Daily Caller , according to a detailed survey by Media Matters .
They include Jonah Bennet , who participated in a white nationalist group chat .
Having one racist in your publication might be an accident , but having a dozen ( if we include Carlson himself ) suggests a more sinister pattern .
There is , in fact , a racist social network that has a beachhead in Carlson ’ s media empire .
In a 2016 e-mail , Jonah Bennet noted , “ No one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so it ’ s extremely vulnerable to outside subversion.
” Even the phrase “ subversion ” is too exculpatory , since it suggests that the owners of The Daily Caller and Fox News don ’ t know what is going on .
But the repeated hiring of racists of various stripes happens only because they know perfectly well that they are selling white nationalism .
According to The Washington Post , “ Despite rhetoric and policies that are largely supportive of the president , Carlson has gained the appreciation of both Rupert and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump , at least in comparison with Fox News hosts such as Sean Hannity and Jeannine Pirro , both of whom are fervent admirers of the president.
” Fox News insiders speak of Carlson as a “ hedge ” in case Trump loses .
Which suggests the Murdoch family thinks that Carlson ’ s version of white nationalism is the future of American conservatism in the post-Trump world .
Neff himself may be gone , but future Neffs will dominate the right-wing media .

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Blake Neff graduated from Dartmouth in 2013, and according to his school’s alumni magazine, “never applied to any job he’s landed.” Within four years of graduating, he was a top writer for Tucker Carlson’s nightly show on Fox News, the most watched cable news show in history. Neff’s quick ascent was due to the fact that he plugged into the right-wing media network even as an undergraduate, when he wrote for The Dartmouth Review. This storied publication, infamous for its incendiary pranks, was set up for the express purpose of cultivating right-wing journalistic talent. Just as the Review had earlier launched Dinesh D’Souza and Laura Ingraham, so it gave Neff an entry point that led to a job at The Hill, followed by work for The Daily Caller. Carlson founded the Caller in 2010 and sold his stake in it only last month. Carlson poached Neff from the paper in 2017 and brought him to Fox News.
Neff’s rapid rise in the world came to quick end on Friday when he was fired by Fox News in response to a CNN report that the writer had a double life on an online chat room where he gave vent to open racism, misogyny, and homophobia. In an extensive report by Oliver Darcy, it was revealed that Neff was a frequent poster on the site AutoAdmit, using the pseudonym CharlesXII, an allusion to an 18th century Swedish monarch Neff seems to have admired for his legendary aversion to sex and alcohol. (In 2017, when he was interviewed by a dating column at The Washington Post, Neff described alcohol as “poison” and said “most of my hobbies allow me to escape women.”)
As CharlesXII, Neff displayed a remarkable range of bigotries. Just last week, he participated in a forum entitled, “Would u let a JET BLACK congo n****er do lasik eye surgery on u for 50% off?” (The original title spelled out the offensive word.) Neff responded in the forum, “I wouldn’t get LASIK from an Asian for free, so no.” In an earlier post, Neff stated, “Black doods staying inside playing Call of Duty is probably one of the biggest factors keeping crime down.” He also made derogatory comments about gay men and repeatedly posted information about a Facebook acquaintance, whose appearance and personal life became a running target of mockery on the forum.
In firing Neff, Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott and President Jay Wallace tried to portray the writer as an aberration, a bad apple who had somehow wound up in an otherwise wholesome barrel. “We want to make abundantly clear that Fox News Media strongly condemns this horrific racist, misogynistic and homophobic behavior,” Scott and Wallace wrote in a memo sent to staff on Saturday. “Neff’s abhorrent conduct on this forum was never divulged to the show or the network until Friday, at which point we swiftly accepted his resignation. Make no mistake, actions such as his cannot and will not be tolerated at any time in any part of our work force.” More From Jeet Heer The Indigenous Roots of Robbie Robertson’s Rock and Roll Revolution August 14, 2023 Why Does This Racist Keep Getting Silicon Valley Money? August 11, 2023 When Phallocrats Go Limp August 4, 2023
But Neff’s bigoted posting was no accident. Nor can it be easily separated from the work he did for Carlson. Moreover, far from being a lone wolf, Neff is clearly only one of a large cohort of white nationalists who have worked for Carlson at The Daily Caller. These writers naturally end up in Carlson’s orbit, since both the Caller and Carlson’s show promote white nationalism, albeit in terms much more euphemistic than online forums like AutoAdmit. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
As CNN reports, “Sometimes, material Neff encountered on the forum found its way on to Carlson’s show…. In some cases, language Neff used on the forum ended up on the show.” Neff and CharlesXII were not a case of dueling identities like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Rather, CharlesXII was simply Neff writing in a forum where friskier language is allowed. On Fox News he expressed the same ideas, just in terms permissible to family viewing. There’s no difference in ideology, simply a difference in etiquette.
Nor is Neff the only bigot Carlson has employed. In 2017, the Southern Poverty Law Center argued that “the Daily Caller has a white nationalist problem.” It reported that the website had published Jason Kessler, whose contributions to the Caller were removed after he organized the infamous “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville where neo-Nazi violence led to the murder of an anti-racist activist. During the time the Caller was publishing Kessler, the site’s deputy editor was Scott Greer, who was extensively photographed keeping company with such far-right groups as the Wolves of Vinland. Current Issue View our current issue
The Daily Caller initially rejected criticism of Greer, but ended up severing ties with him when it turned out that he had written under a pseudonym for Radix Journal, a white nationalist publication founded by neo-Nazi Richard Spencer. According to a report in The Atlantic, “Greer expressed racist antiblack views and anti-Semitism in the Radix articles he wrote under the Michael McGregor byline, and disparaged other groups including feminists, immigrants, Christian Zionists, and the pro-life movement.”
Aside from Neff, Kessler, and Greer, at least eight other writers with white nationalist ties have written for The Daily Caller, according to a detailed survey by Media Matters. They include Jonah Bennet, who participated in a white nationalist group chat.
Having one racist in your publication might be an accident, but having a dozen (if we include Carlson himself) suggests a more sinister pattern. There is, in fact, a racist social network that has a beachhead in Carlson’s media empire.
In a 2016 e-mail, Jonah Bennet noted, “No one owns the commons of conservatism, and so it’s extremely vulnerable to outside subversion.” Even the phrase “subversion” is too exculpatory, since it suggests that the owners of The Daily Caller and Fox News don’t know what is going on. But the repeated hiring of racists of various stripes happens only because they know perfectly well that they are selling white nationalism.
According to The Washington Post, “Despite rhetoric and policies that are largely supportive of the president, Carlson has gained the appreciation of both Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch for his seeming independence from Trump, at least in comparison with Fox News hosts such as Sean Hannity and Jeannine Pirro, both of whom are fervent admirers of the president.”
Fox News insiders speak of Carlson as a “hedge” in case Trump loses. Which suggests the Murdoch family thinks that Carlson’s version of white nationalism is the future of American conservatism in the post-Trump world. Neff himself may be gone, but future Neffs will dominate the right-wing media.


Saviors

This article appears in the July 27/August 3, 2020 issue.
Spiders under the furniture
cut loose the papery drained bodies
as simple testaments
of just how valuable they have been
how surrounded we were


thenation--2020-07-14--How Becoming a Mother Is Like Space Travel

The astronaut told us he didn ’ t look out the window for eight and a half minutes as the rocket launched him beyond our atmosphere .
Terrifying things happened— ground vanished , boosters exploded , day became night—and he did not look .
He was focusing , he said , on his job .
He was up there a long time .
He learned to sleep suspended .
He learned how the sunrise looks when you watch it every morning from the soft dark mouth of space .
Many things , he told us , were different than he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s no space ice cream , he said .
That ’ s a big hoax .
His vision blurred .
His body became a study : blood , appetite , cognitive function .
He took many pictures .
All of them were beautiful .
None of them showed what it was like to float .
When the astronaut returned to earth , more tests were run .
Scientists discovered that seven percent of his genes had changed in space .
He left the planet as himself .
He came back as himself , @ @

This article appears in the July 27/August 3, 2020 issue.
The astronaut told us
he didn’t look out the window
for eight and a half minutes
as the rocket launched him
beyond our atmosphere.
Terrifying things happened—
ground vanished, boosters
exploded, day became
night—and he did not look.
He was focusing,
he said, on his job.
He was up there
a long time. He learned
to sleep suspended. He learned
how the sunrise looks
when you watch it every morning
from the soft dark mouth
of space. Many things,
he told us, were different
than he’d once expected.
There’s no space ice cream,
he said. That’s a big hoax.
His vision blurred.
His body became a study:
blood, appetite, cognitive function.
He took many pictures.
All of them were beautiful.
None of them showed
what it was like to float.
When the astronaut returned
to earth, more tests were run.
Scientists discovered that
seven percent of his genes
had changed in space.
He left the planet
as himself. He came back
as himself, rearranged.


thenation--2020-07-14--On the Record’s Act of Witness

On the Record’s Act of Witness

When accusing powerful men of sexual assault , women of color anticipate a higher burden of proof and a slimmer margin for error .
On the Record seethes at this plight .
In frank detail , the documentary recounts the multiple sexual assault and rape allegations against hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons and his accusers ’ struggles to go public .
Codirected by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering , documentarians who previously chronicled sexual assault on college campuses ( The Hunting Ground ) and in the military ( The Invisible War ) , the film uses the harrowing accounts of Simmons @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s double jeopardy when it comes to making such accusations .
Drew Dixon , who once worked as an A & R executive at Simmons ’ s famed Def Jam label , serves as the film ’ s lodestar .
She was interviewed before , during , and after she agreed to participate in a New York Times story on the accusations against him , and her difficult choice to go on the record becomes the heart of the film .
In content and form , On the Record departs from the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the entertainment industry .
Whereas works like Surviving R. Kelly and Leaving Neverland are organized around the tabloid allure of mighty figures plummeting from grace , On the Record holds Simmons at a distance , focusing on his alleged actions rather than his mythos .
When he does appear in photographs and archival footage , his behavior and demeanor are mostly casual and unexceptional .
Instead of a uniquely monstrous figure , he comes across as an archetypal workplace harasser .
No matter how extraordinary a life Simmons has led or how @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into a global force , in On the Record , he ’ s just a sexual predator .
The willingness to depict Simmons in this fashion elevates the film from true crime to something more probing .
As On the Record helps give voice to the women ’ s stories , it also becomes clear that for Black women in particular , the public and the record are fraught resources .
While the film , frustratingly , never defines what “ on the record ” means for journalism , it excels at laying @ @ @ @ @ @ @ choosing between silence and disclosure .
For the women in this film , to seek accountability is to risk victim blaming , professional retaliation , and ugly accusations of betraying the Black community , outcomes that many of them expect even in the age of Me Too .
As a result , the case of Simmons—who now has 20 named accusers , as well as a documented history of harassment at his yoga studio—calls on us to build new systems of accountability and to question the existing ones .
Before landing at HBO @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vexed path to release .
The film was originally supposed to be distributed by Apple ’ s streaming service , Apple TV+ , with Oprah Winfrey as its executive producer , but two weeks before its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival , Winfrey and Apple dropped out of the project .
In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter , Winfrey said , “ In my opinion , there is more work to be done on the film to illuminate the full scope of what the victims endured and it has become clear @ @ @ @ @ @ @ aligned in that creative vision.
” A week later it was reported that she had been lobbied to abandon the film by Simmons himself as well as by his supporters , among them 50 Cent , who suggested that Winfrey had a vendetta against Black men because of her support for Leaving Neverland , which recounts the sexual abuse allegations against Michael Jackson .
It was also revealed that before Winfrey ’ s departure , the film went through multiple cuts due to her concerns that Dick and Ziering , who are white @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Black history .
These production woes can be felt at times in the film ’ s brisk pacing , but they do not undermine its core strengths .
By detaching itself from Simmons ’ s legacy , On the Record centers the women ’ s stories .
Alongside Dixon , the activist and former model Sil Lai Abrams and the author and singer Sheri Sher speak about their encounters with Simmons .
Each woman recalls the professional and personal consequences of her alleged assault , how workplaces and intimate relationships became poisoned as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ most time to Dixon ’ s derailment .
After her alleged assault , she quit her job at Def Jam despite her quick advancement there , which had been painful , she says , because Simmons harassed her throughout her employment .
She found another position at Arista Records for a few years , but after the man who hired her left , his replacement , L.A. Reid , harassed her as well , she says .
( In 2017 , Reid left his position at Sony Music after her accusations against him @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s work experience was one of recurrent harassment is an indictment of not merely the perpetrators but the recording industry as a whole .
The symmetries in the women ’ s accounts are as powerful as the individual tellings .
Abrams , like Dixon , left the fashion industry after her alleged assault , and Sher , a member of the pioneering all-women rap group Mercedes Ladies , found herself clearly conflicted .
Because Simmons was funding the group ’ s demo , making her accusations against him public would mean potentially @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Those kinds of power imbalances played into Simmons ’ s behavior , which allegedly often involved luring women to his apartment to discuss their careers .
While detailing the accusers ’ stories , Ziering and Dick zoom out to consider the wider context of hip-hop during Simmons ’ s reign .
In the film ’ s telling , the machismo that drove much of hip-hop ’ s ascent in the late 1980s was couched in a sense of Black power and Black cool that implicitly excluded women , laying the groundwork for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ does not scapegoat rap , however , and in a punchy montage linking rock , blues , and punk songs , the filmmakers make it clear that misogyny is a music problem , not just a rap problem .
Rather than putting hip-hop on trial , On the Record is interested in exploring Black women ’ s particular stake in the genre as listeners and participants and , in the case of Simmons ’ s accusers , as workers .
The film ’ s commentators widen that view even further .
Through interviews @ @ @ @ @ @ @ activist who helped start Me Too ; the cultural critic Joan Morgan ; and the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw , the film connects the dismissal of Black women ’ s accounts of sexual assault to slavery , police brutality , and Eurocentric beauty norms .
The interviews also describe the tightrope that many Black women walk when it comes to sexual crimes perpetrated by Black men ; they know that to point to the Mike Tysons and Bill Cosbys of the world can also invoke the specter of the Emmett Tills and Mack @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of such crimes being trumped up and falsified by racist fears and the grim reality that they do happen , Black women are left adrift .
They feel as if they are forced to choose their community or themselves , with neither choice ensuring their safety and both being unfairly restricted .
Dixon in particular notes that the public censures of Anita Hill and Desiree Washington informed her decision to remain silent about her accusations—a comparison that communicates not only how much power Simmons wielded at the time but also how one miscarriage @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The film would have benefited from digging further into the history of conflicts between Black men and women .
From former Black Panther Elaine Brown leaving the party over its internal chauvinism to rapper and reporter Dee Barnes getting disparaged by N.W.A for going public about her alleged assault by Dr. Dre , the precedent for Dixon ’ s experience runs deeper than the movie suggests .
Despite this , however , the film ’ s overall message is clear .
When deciding how to handle their alleged assaults , Simmons ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ place .
Almost every Black woman who participates in the documentary describes a forced self-reliance due to the history of Black women being silenced .
On the Record concludes that this outlook is born of the sad reality that Black women ’ s pain rarely has an audience , even in Black communities .
The film opens with many of its participants expressing an alienation from Me Too as it gained momentum , and that anxiety resounds every time a Black woman appears on the screen , culminating with Dixon asserting , “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Her statement channels the mantra of activists who protested the national backlog of rape kits and the historic erasure of Black women ’ s personhood .
In these moments it becomes clear that On the Record necessarily has different goals from the directors ’ previous work .
Institutional hypocrisy has long been Dick ’ s focus , from his meticulous critique of the Motion Picture Association ’ s flawed rating system in 2006 ’ s This Film Is Not Yet Rated to the skewering of the Food and Drug Administration in The Bleeding @ @ @ @ @ @ @ poorly regulated medical device industry .
Whereas these earlier films proposed some kind of institutional reckoning or at least exposed the systemic flaws that prevented one , On the Record ’ s ambit is depressingly more diffuse .
Black women have been failed by numerous institutions—workplaces , police departments , courtrooms , and the press—driving home the infuriating sense that their only resource is themselves .
On the Record ends with Dixon cautiously navigating life after coming forward .
Newly divorced , seemingly considering a return to making music , and now acquainted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she has obviously been changed by her disclosure .
What resonates in the aftermath of her experience is that neither she nor the filmmakers attempt to fit these shifts into a tidy frame .
Rather than retribution or empowerment or resolution , Dixon expresses gratitude—to herself and to the women who helped her tell her story .
The relief in that tiny thank-you is fleeting , and the herculean effort it took to make it possible is damning , but that ’ s the film ’ s gutting last impression .
If this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , what does it say about the punishment ?

This article appears in the July 27/August 3, 2020 issue.
When accusing powerful men of sexual assault, women of color anticipate a higher burden of proof and a slimmer margin for error. On the Record seethes at this plight. In frank detail, the documentary recounts the multiple sexual assault and rape allegations against hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons and his accusers’ struggles to go public. Codirected by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, documentarians who previously chronicled sexual assault on college campuses (The Hunting Ground) and in the military (The Invisible War), the film uses the harrowing accounts of Simmons’s accusers to examine Black women’s double jeopardy when it comes to making such accusations. Drew Dixon, who once worked as an A&R executive at Simmons’s famed Def Jam label, serves as the film’s lodestar. She was interviewed before, during, and after she agreed to participate in a New York Times story on the accusations against him, and her difficult choice to go on the record becomes the heart of the film.
In content and form, On the Record departs from the growing catalog of exposés on sexual abuse in the entertainment industry. Whereas works like Surviving R. Kelly and Leaving Neverland are organized around the tabloid allure of mighty figures plummeting from grace, On the Record holds Simmons at a distance, focusing on his alleged actions rather than his mythos. When he does appear in photographs and archival footage, his behavior and demeanor are mostly casual and unexceptional. Instead of a uniquely monstrous figure, he comes across as an archetypal workplace harasser. No matter how extraordinary a life Simmons has led or how critical he has been in turning hip-hop into a global force, in On the Record, he’s just a sexual predator.
The willingness to depict Simmons in this fashion elevates the film from true crime to something more probing. As On the Record helps give voice to the women’s stories, it also becomes clear that for Black women in particular, the public and the record are fraught resources. While the film, frustratingly, never defines what “on the record” means for journalism, it excels at laying out the mental calculus women perform when choosing between silence and disclosure. For the women in this film, to seek accountability is to risk victim blaming, professional retaliation, and ugly accusations of betraying the Black community, outcomes that many of them expect even in the age of Me Too. As a result, the case of Simmons—who now has 20 named accusers, as well as a documented history of harassment at his yoga studio—calls on us to build new systems of accountability and to question the existing ones.
Before landing at HBO Max, On the Record faced a vexed path to release. The film was originally supposed to be distributed by Apple’s streaming service, Apple TV+, with Oprah Winfrey as its executive producer, but two weeks before its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, Winfrey and Apple dropped out of the project. In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, Winfrey said, “In my opinion, there is more work to be done on the film to illuminate the full scope of what the victims endured and it has become clear that the filmmakers and I are not aligned in that creative vision.” A week later it was reported that she had been lobbied to abandon the film by Simmons himself as well as by his supporters, among them 50 Cent, who suggested that Winfrey had a vendetta against Black men because of her support for Leaving Neverland, which recounts the sexual abuse allegations against Michael Jackson. It was also reported by The New York Times that before Winfrey’s departure, she was uncertain about whether Dick and Ziering, who are white, “captured the nuances of hip-hop culture and the struggles of black women.” Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
By detaching itself from Simmons’s legacy, On the Record centers the women’s stories. Alongside Dixon, the activist and former model Sil Lai Abrams and the author and singer Sheri Sher speak about their encounters with Simmons. Each woman recalls the professional and personal consequences of her alleged assault, how workplaces and intimate relationships became poisoned as a result.
The film gives the most time to Dixon’s derailment. After her alleged assault, she quit her job at Def Jam despite her quick advancement there, which had been painful, she says, because Simmons harassed her throughout her employment. She found another position at Arista Records for a few years, but after the man who hired her left, his replacement, L.A. Reid, harassed her as well, she says. (In 2017, Reid left his position at Sony Music after her accusations against him came to light.) That Dixon’s work experience was one of recurrent harassment is an indictment of not merely the perpetrators but the recording industry as a whole.
The symmetries in the women’s accounts are as powerful as the individual tellings. Abrams, like Dixon, left the fashion industry after her alleged assault, and Sher, a member of the pioneering all-women rap group Mercedes Ladies, found herself clearly conflicted. Because Simmons was funding the group’s demo, making her accusations against him public would mean potentially sabotaging Mercedes Ladies’ chances for success. Those kinds of power imbalances played into Simmons’s behavior, which allegedly often involved luring women to his apartment to discuss their careers.
While detailing the accusers’ stories, Ziering and Dick zoom out to consider the wider context of hip-hop during Simmons’s reign. In the film’s telling, the machismo that drove much of hip-hop’s ascent in the late 1980s was couched in a sense of Black power and Black cool that implicitly excluded women, laying the groundwork for casual and explicit misogyny. The film does not scapegoat rap, however, and in a punchy montage linking rock, blues, and punk songs, the filmmakers make it clear that misogyny is a music problem, not just a rap problem. Rather than putting hip-hop on trial, On the Record is interested in exploring Black women’s particular stake in the genre as listeners and participants and, in the case of Simmons’s accusers, as workers.
The film’s commentators widen that view even further. Through interviews with experts like Tarana Burke, the activist who helped start Me Too; the cultural critic Joan Morgan; and the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, the film connects the dismissal of Black women’s accounts of sexual assault to slavery, police brutality, and Eurocentric beauty norms. The interviews also describe the tightrope that many Black women walk when it comes to sexual crimes perpetrated by Black men; they know that to point to the Mike Tysons and Bill Cosbys of the world can also invoke the specter of the Emmett Tills and Mack Charles Parkers. Between the grim history of such crimes being trumped up and falsified by racist fears and the grim reality that they do happen, Black women are left adrift. They feel as if they are forced to choose their community or themselves, with neither choice ensuring their safety and both being unfairly restricted.
Dixon in particular notes that the public censures of Anita Hill and Desiree Washington informed her decision to remain silent about her accusations—a comparison that communicates not only how much power Simmons wielded at the time but also how one miscarriage of justice has consequences for others. The film would have benefited from digging further into the history of conflicts between Black men and women. From former Black Panther Elaine Brown leaving the party over its internal chauvinism to rapper and reporter Dee Barnes getting disparaged by N.W.A for going public about her alleged assault by Dr. Dre, the precedent for Dixon’s experience runs deeper than the movie suggests. Despite this, however, the film’s overall message is clear. When deciding how to handle their alleged assaults, Simmons’s accusers found themselves caught in an impossible place.
Almost every Black woman who participates in the documentary describes a forced self-reliance due to the history of Black women being silenced. On the Record concludes that this outlook is born of the sad reality that Black women’s pain rarely has an audience, even in Black communities. The film opens with many of its participants expressing an alienation from Me Too as it gained momentum, and that anxiety resounds every time a Black woman appears on the screen, culminating with Dixon asserting, “I am a living crime scene.” Her statement channels the mantra of activists who protested the national backlog of rape kits and the historic erasure of Black women’s personhood.
In these moments it becomes clear that On the Record necessarily has different goals from the directors’ previous work. Institutional hypocrisy has long been Dick’s focus, from his meticulous critique of the Motion Picture Association’s flawed rating system in 2006’s This Film Is Not Yet Rated to the skewering of the Food and Drug Administration in The Bleeding Edge, his 2018 study of the poorly regulated medical device industry. Whereas these earlier films proposed some kind of institutional reckoning or at least exposed the systemic flaws that prevented one, On the Record’s ambit is depressingly more diffuse. Black women have been failed by numerous institutions—workplaces, police departments, courtrooms, and the press—driving home the infuriating sense that their only resource is themselves.
On the Record ends with Dixon cautiously navigating life after coming forward. Newly divorced, seemingly considering a return to making music, and now acquainted with fellow survivors from the film, she has obviously been changed by her disclosure. What resonates in the aftermath of her experience is that neither she nor the filmmakers attempt to fit these shifts into a tidy frame. Rather than retribution or empowerment or resolution, Dixon expresses gratitude—to herself and to the women who helped her tell her story. The relief in that tiny thank-you is fleeting, and the herculean effort it took to make it possible is damning, but that’s the film’s gutting last impression. If this is the reward for challenging powerful men, what does it say about the punishment?
Correction: A previous version of this article originally stated that On the Record went through multiple cuts as a result of Oprah Winfrey’s concerns regarding the filmmakers’ knowledge of hip-hop and Black history. This piece has been updated.


thenation--2020-07-14--J.M. Coetzee’s States of Exile

J.M. Coetzee’s States of Exile

A man and a boy arrive before a low , sprawling building , hurrying to enter before it closes for the day .
The place is a government office of some kind , a Centro de Reubicación in a fictional town called Novilla .
Speaking in halting Spanish and unfamiliar with the word reubicación , the man asks the clerk for help .
He is seeking employment and a place to live .
“ We are new arrivals , ” he tells the functionary .
“ I have a child with me.
” So begins The Childhood of Jesus , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by J.M .
Coetzee that continues with The Schooldays of Jesus and comes to a perplexing climax in The Death of Jesus .
What is it like to start life anew ?
the first novel asks .
The two that follow extend this line of inquiry , working into it questions of education and labor , of parenting and love , even if the overall conclusion remains ambiguous .
The novels offer no definitive answers , although they do suggest that within this trilogy-length puzzle of what it means to begin , one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what the art of the novel means for Coetzee at this stage of his prolific career .
The opening lines of the first novel , with their sparse but carefully chosen details , prepare the reader for a kind of stripped-down realism .
The Spanish relocation center is inspired , one assumes , by the global refugee crisis in Southern Europe .
The reader is primed , almost by force of habit , to think of overcrowded camps along the Mediterranean , of displaced humans making their slow , painful way north , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reluctantly offered by the residual welfare states of Europe .
And because the series bears the aura of Jesus ’ s name , one also expects a touch of allegory , the kind of symbolism beloved of the dominant writers , artists , and human rights campaigners of our time .
A liberal message about Jesus resurrected and retrofitted for our contemporary turbulence , one thinks .
What could be a more apt response to authoritarian demagogues and their border walls ?
Jesus , after all , was a refugee .
Yet as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the trilogy , we begin to realize that the contemporary refugee crisis provides little more than a rudimentary scaffold for the questions Coetzee is interested in pursuing .
We see the occasional obtuseness of the city bureaucracy , the generosity of the stevedores among whom Simón , the man , finds work carrying sacks of grain , and the eccentricity of the neighbors encountered by David , the child , at the housing complex where the new arrivals are assigned an apartment .
Throughout , we look for the clues that might give @ @ @ @ @ @ @ titles , the signs that might be portents .
And yet steadily , almost every element of the novels ’ interpretive schema crumbles , before it completely falls apart .
Simón , it turns out , is not David ’ s father but a fellow refugee met on their boat .
His mother is believed to be somewhere in Novilla , but they have no name or description for her , even though Simón believes he will recognize her by instinct .
And as he and David go about their existence , life @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but dull .
The diet is composed mostly of bread , the labor largely manual , the interactions among adults more or less devoid of erotic charge .
Workers can attend philosophy classes , and all the buses are free .
We begin to realize that Coetzee has led us into—rather than an allegory of our contemporary world or a representation of Jesus ’ s—an in-between nowhere place , a mildly oppressive utopia or a relatively humane dystopia , a paradoxical realm where human beings arrive , no matter their age , as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Readers of Coetzee have been in such a world before , although it may take them a while to realize it .
In 2003 , the year he received the Nobel Prize , he published the beguiling Elizabeth Costello .
Structured as a series of lectures delivered by its eponymous protagonist , a writer and fierce campaigner for animal rights , the novel features talks that had been delivered by Coetzee , a vegetarian who has written about animal rights .
And if this metafictional slippage is insufficient , Elizabeth Costello goes even @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , “ At the Gate , ” that is a reworking of the “ Before the Law ” episode in Kafka ’ s The Trial .
In contrast with the realist locations where Costello delivers her lectures , mostly colleges and universities in the West , this final chapter presents her disembarking from a bus in a town that has not much specificity to it and whose minimalist features ( cafés , a windowless dormitory for new arrivals , and a bandstand on which the musicians play Strauss waltzes ) seem to belong @ @ @ @ @ @ @ border town in the year 1912.
” Costello , otherwise our contemporary , has , it seems , slipped into a time that is not historical so much as an amalgamation of the literary and the metaphysical .
Beyond the gate lies the great unknown , visible to her—when a guard allows her a peek—only as a flash of blinding light .
“ The journey that brought her here , to this country , to this town , that seemed to reach its end when the bus halted and its door opened on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the end of it all.
” One wonders if her arrival is a gesture toward the afterlife .
Many of the novel ’ s lectures , after all , are concerned with questions of aging , physical decline , and death .
But if so , this gesture comes with a twist : When asked by the authorities in charge of the gate to write a statement of her faith , Costello has trouble articulating this in a manner both truthful and emotionally satisfying to her .
God has failed in her world @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not even quite believe in art anymore .
And so the novel ends , leaving us with a question : What is the afterlife for those who do not believe in one ?
This question of belief and its absence—aesthetic and metaphysical—animates the Jesus trilogy as well .
Like Elizabeth Costello , the novels take place in a world that veers away from realism as well as allegory .
Even if a Kafkaesque realm circa 1912 is not quite the setting , Novilla and Estrella , where Simón and David move later , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
There are televisions but no cellphones , cars but no aircraft , soccer but no Internet .
Yet what makes the Jesus novels even more disorienting , perhaps , is that their rejection of realism and contemporary reality comes not at the end point of a life , as with Elizabeth Costello , but is instead inserted into an existence that is both at its beginning and its end , where the arc of a life flashes by so quickly that one might wonder if it existed at all .
Five years @ @ @ @ @ @ @ David is 10 by the time the trilogy comes to a close .
In those five years of living , the questions about art , God , morality , and politics that so troubled Costello abound .
Now , however , they are inflected with an even greater ambiguity .
Seen largely through the eyes of Simón , one of a series of father figures encountered in the novels , David is an unsettling character for the reader .
In the first novel , he is initially portrayed as an ordinary child , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ surroundings , his metaphysical questions only as troubling as those encountered from the lips of anyone that age .
Yet Coetzee is only sporadically interested in interiority and relationships , and the trilogy takes the first of its many perverse turns when Simón , against the desperate protestations of David , hands him over , along with the apartment he has been allotted by the Novilla bureaucracy , to a woman called Inés .
Even though Inés is clearly not David ’ s biological mother or particularly maternal—her days until then involved playing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ company of a German shepherd called Bolívar—Simón is certain that this is the mother David was destined to have .
At first reluctant to assume such a role , Inés eventually accepts this responsibility , even as David ’ s behavior puts him at odds with a series of educational institutions .
Although this leads at the end of the first book to Inés and Simón ’ s fleeing with David , his resistance to all but the most unconventional forms of pedagogy persists in The Schooldays of Jesus , where David , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what is called the Academy of Dance .
There he falls under the tutelage of a mysterious musician , Señor Arroyo , and his charismatic wife , Ana Magdalena , and can finally indulge his singular epistemology , which revolves around the notions that the only book worth reading is Don Quixote and that numbers are connected to the stars .
When he performs his special “ dance of Seven ” at an academy gathering , the effect is uncanny : “ As if the earth has lost its downward power , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” Simón observes , “ to become pure light.
” As we make our way through The Schooldays of Jesus , we begin to realize there is more than just the ethereal to David .
His resistance to learning and his difficult relationship with adults contain something other than trauma , something that seems to be almost a thought experiment on Coetzee ’ s part , a dismissal of theories of both nature and nurture in relation to the development of a child .
Characters flit in and out of David ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mostly to bit parts .
Toward Simón , who often comes across as pedantic and affectless , David is willful and dismissive .
Inés , he treats as his follower .
Then there is Dmitri , encountered first as a doorman at the Academy of Dance , a large , slovenly figure given to showing pornography to the children and fixated on Ana Magdalena .
David , who seems strangely drawn to him , becomes even more interested after Dmitri sexually assaults and murders Ana Magdalena .
A long , confusing trial leads @ @ @ @ @ @ @ incarceration as to frequent encounters between him and David , whom Dmitri considers his “ king.
” The Death of Jesus picks up their stories after the trial .
With the Academy of Dance temporarily shut down , David takes to soccer .
Revealing himself to be a gifted winger on the field , he is scouted by a man who runs an orphanage .
David moves there , abandoning Simón and Inés , but his tenure as a player at the orphanage proves to be brief , and soon he is reacquainted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to a long hospitalization for David , and Dmitri resurfaces as a hospital worker .
The doctors are unable to diagnose David ’ s illness , and midway through the novel comes the death signposted in the title .
This is a bold move for any novelist , but David ’ s death brings no closure .
Instead , the mystery continues , as Dmitri believes himself to be the sole recipient of a message from David , even if the content of that message , he writes in a long letter to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ For Simón , struggling with sorrow after David ’ s death and leafing through their copy of Don Quixote as if it were “ a relic , ” there is no message at all or at least none that can ever be known .
The question of faith and its absence that we saw in Elizabeth Costello returns but in even more contradictory fashion , leaving us with almost nothing beyond the fact of the labor that has produced this puzzling trilogy .
Writing about the works produced in the twilight of an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ marked out for special scrutiny those in which the artist ’ s “ late style ” was expressed “ not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence , difficulty , and unresolved contradiction.
” Building on a phrase and idea taken from Adorno , Said used Ibsen to make his point .
Ibsen ’ s final plays—in particular When We Dead Awaken—offer , in contrast with Shakespeare , not harmony , Said explains , but only “ an occasion to stir up more anxiety , tamper irrevocably with the possibility of closure , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unsettled than before.
” As description , this seems quite apt for Coetzee ’ s Jesus trilogy , which raises so many questions and offers almost no definitive answers .
One wonders , for instance , in spite of the intermittent allegorical elements , whether the problem being wrestled with here is art rather than religion .
It is an interpretation given some weight by the recurrent , quasi-talismanic status of Don Quixote and by the possible reading of David as a variation on its archetypal fictional protagonist as much as a version @ @ @ @ @ @ @ echo of the late knight of La Mancha .
If David is adrift , it is perhaps also because he is traveling through a form that , while new to Cervantes , is undeniably worn some four centuries later in the hands of Coetzee .
Much of Coetzee ’ s career has , in fact , tilted at the windmills of literary realism .
The struggle is there in his first book , 1974 ’ s Dusklands , with its twinned but stylistically quite different novellas that take on the Vietnam War and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is continued in anti-apartheid works like Waiting for the Barbarians and Life and Times of Michael K. Only in his most popular novel , Disgrace , does he offer us something of an exception , one that comes across as the norm only because its thematically freighted realism—of white masculinity in postapartheid South Africa—was rewarded by prize committees , winning its author the Booker for a second time as well as reliable placement in liberal arts curricula everywhere .
Coetzee ’ s angular relationship with realism has grown only more acute after he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ South Africa to Australia .
His subsequent fictional works appear to campaign against realism with even greater intensity .
Elizabeth Costello was followed by Slow Man , another novel about the aging body that also features Costello , who appears a third of the way through , claiming that its protagonist is a character in a novel she is working on .
Coetzee ’ s challenge to the realist form found its most singular expression in 2007 ’ s Diary of a Bad Year .
Riffing on Defoe ’ s A Journal of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its own ominous valence—Coetzee produced not so much a novel as an extended set of essays on the modern state .
The narrative element reduced mostly to footnotes , the main text of the novel involved a series of treatises by Señor C , a writer who , like Coetzee , has just immigrated to Australia from South Africa and who excoriates Anglo-American democracy for its self-congratulatory rhetoric even as it leaves in its wake the wreckage of the Iraq War , Abu Ghraib , and Guantánamo .
If not realist , though @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was addressing the moment in Diary of a Bad Year .
There was no escape or evasion here , only a fiercely moral intelligence that has been in operation since his earliest works of fiction , a courage to take on the same liberal Anglo-American world that has , by and large , celebrated his status as an artist .
The Jesus trilogy , however , while rejecting realism , seems also to jettison the contemporary world .
Readers must make their way through a series of novels that do not seem to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ appear to pertain to a realm far removed from that of humanity .
There are barely any reference points , only a bewildering succession of Spanish names in a land that could be anywhere vaguely European and where all the characters—other than perhaps David , the boy knight-king—are devoid of memories .
So , just as the past is more or less absent , the present in the Jesus novels ( and in particular the final one ) is not fully substantial , either .
In spite of the housing and work and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is in some deep sense unhoused .
Different as the adult characters Simón , Inés , and Dmitri may be from one another , they all give the impression of wandering through the fragmentary remnants of modernity—the state , the novel , and realism .
They are in exile in a manner that sidesteps the contemporary questions we thought in the beginning they were intended to examine : border control regimes , displaced people from the Global South , the new authoritarianism .
There is no reason to believe , given Coetzee ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is not opposed to the latest manifestations of cruelty expressed by the modern state .
But the Jesus novels also suggest that the estrangement felt by their characters—and by us as readers—while disquieting and profound , occupies an uneasy relationship to our alienation from the contemporary .
In Diary of a Bad Year , Señor C talks about a helpless “ quietism ” that has become the norm for citizens of modern Western democracies , an “ inner emigration.
” But in writing an allegory that is barely an allegory and a trilogy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Coetzee appears to have made his own literary displacement total , external as well as internal .
Drawing on Adorno , Said spoke of difficult late works as constituting , for the intransigent artist , “ a form of exile.
” Coetzee ’ s late work is exemplary in that regard .

This article appears in the July 27/August 3, 2020 issue.
A man and a boy arrive before a low, sprawling building, hurrying to enter before it closes for the day. The place is a government office of some kind, a Centro de Reubicación in a fictional town called Novilla. Speaking in halting Spanish and unfamiliar with the word reubicación, the man asks the clerk for help. He is seeking employment and a place to live. “We are new arrivals,” he tells the functionary. “I have a child with me.” Books in Review The Childhood of Jesus By J.M. Coetzee Buy this book The Schooldays of Jesus By J.M. Coetzee Buy this book The Death of Jesus By J.M. Coetzee Buy this book
So begins The Childhood of Jesus, the first in a trilogy of novels by J.M. Coetzee that continues with The Schooldays of Jesus and comes to a perplexing climax in The Death of Jesus. What is it like to start life anew? the first novel asks. The two that follow extend this line of inquiry, working into it questions of education and labor, of parenting and love, even if the overall conclusion remains ambiguous. The novels offer no definitive answers, although they do suggest that within this trilogy-length puzzle of what it means to begin, one might find the even bigger question of what the art of the novel means for Coetzee at this stage of his prolific career.
The opening lines of the first novel, with their sparse but carefully chosen details, prepare the reader for a kind of stripped-down realism. The Spanish relocation center is inspired, one assumes, by the global refugee crisis in Southern Europe. The reader is primed, almost by force of habit, to think of overcrowded camps along the Mediterranean, of displaced humans making their slow, painful way north, hoping against hope to secure the benefits reluctantly offered by the residual welfare states of Europe. And because the series bears the aura of Jesus’s name, one also expects a touch of allegory, the kind of symbolism beloved of the dominant writers, artists, and human rights campaigners of our time. A liberal message about Jesus resurrected and retrofitted for our contemporary turbulence, one thinks. What could be a more apt response to authoritarian demagogues and their border walls? Jesus, after all, was a refugee.
Yet as we make our own uncertain way through the trilogy, we begin to realize that the contemporary refugee crisis provides little more than a rudimentary scaffold for the questions Coetzee is interested in pursuing. We see the occasional obtuseness of the city bureaucracy, the generosity of the stevedores among whom Simón, the man, finds work carrying sacks of grain, and the eccentricity of the neighbors encountered by David, the child, at the housing complex where the new arrivals are assigned an apartment. Throughout, we look for the clues that might give us insight into the trilogy’s titles, the signs that might be portents. And yet steadily, almost every element of the novels’ interpretive schema crumbles, before it completely falls apart.
Simón, it turns out, is not David’s father but a fellow refugee met on their boat. His mother is believed to be somewhere in Novilla, but they have no name or description for her, even though Simón believes he will recognize her by instinct. And as he and David go about their existence, life in Novilla turns out to be safe but dull. The diet is composed mostly of bread, the labor largely manual, the interactions among adults more or less devoid of erotic charge. Workers can attend philosophy classes, and all the buses are free. We begin to realize that Coetzee has led us into—rather than an allegory of our contemporary world or a representation of Jesus’s—an in-between nowhere place, a mildly oppressive utopia or a relatively humane dystopia, a paradoxical realm where human beings arrive, no matter their age, as if they had just been born. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life A Grim Chronicle of Trump’s Corrupt Public Life Chris Lehmann
Readers of Coetzee have been in such a world before, although it may take them a while to realize it. In 2003, the year he received the Nobel Prize, he published the beguiling Elizabeth Costello. Structured as a series of lectures delivered by its eponymous protagonist, a writer and fierce campaigner for animal rights, the novel features talks that had been delivered by Coetzee, a vegetarian who has written about animal rights. And if this metafictional slippage is insufficient, Elizabeth Costello goes even further: It includes a dazzling chapter, “At the Gate,” that is a reworking of the “Before the Law” episode in Kafka’s The Trial.
In contrast with the realist locations where Costello delivers her lectures, mostly colleges and universities in the West, this final chapter presents her disembarking from a bus in a town that has not much specificity to it and whose minimalist features (cafés, a windowless dormitory for new arrivals, and a bandstand on which the musicians play Strauss waltzes) seem to belong to “an obscure Italian or Austro-Italian border town in the year 1912.” Costello, otherwise our contemporary, has, it seems, slipped into a time that is not historical so much as an amalgamation of the literary and the metaphysical. Beyond the gate lies the great unknown, visible to her—when a guard allows her a peek—only as a flash of blinding light. “The journey that brought her here, to this country, to this town, that seemed to reach its end when the bus halted and its door opened on to the crowded square, was not the end of it all.” Current Issue View our current issue
One wonders if her arrival is a gesture toward the afterlife. Many of the novel’s lectures, after all, are concerned with questions of aging, physical decline, and death. But if so, this gesture comes with a twist: When asked by the authorities in charge of the gate to write a statement of her faith, Costello has trouble articulating this in a manner both truthful and emotionally satisfying to her. God has failed in her world, as has socialism; she cannot even quite believe in art anymore. And so the novel ends, leaving us with a question: What is the afterlife for those who do not believe in one?
This question of belief and its absence—aesthetic and metaphysical—animates the Jesus trilogy as well. Like Elizabeth Costello, the novels take place in a world that veers away from realism as well as allegory. Even if a Kafkaesque realm circa 1912 is not quite the setting, Novilla and Estrella, where Simón and David move later, are cities that deliberately deny the contemporary. There are televisions but no cellphones, cars but no aircraft, soccer but no Internet. Yet what makes the Jesus novels even more disorienting, perhaps, is that their rejection of realism and contemporary reality comes not at the end point of a life, as with Elizabeth Costello, but is instead inserted into an existence that is both at its beginning and its end, where the arc of a life flashes by so quickly that one might wonder if it existed at all.
Five years old in The Childhood of Jesus, David is 10 by the time the trilogy comes to a close. In those five years of living, the questions about art, God, morality, and politics that so troubled Costello abound. Now, however, they are inflected with an even greater ambiguity. Seen largely through the eyes of Simón, one of a series of father figures encountered in the novels, David is an unsettling character for the reader. In the first novel, he is initially portrayed as an ordinary child, understandably bereft in his new, bewildering surroundings, his metaphysical questions only as troubling as those encountered from the lips of anyone that age. Yet Coetzee is only sporadically interested in interiority and relationships, and the trilogy takes the first of its many perverse turns when Simón, against the desperate protestations of David, hands him over, along with the apartment he has been allotted by the Novilla bureaucracy, to a woman called Inés.
Even though Inés is clearly not David’s biological mother or particularly maternal—her days until then involved playing tennis with her two brothers in the company of a German shepherd called Bolívar—Simón is certain that this is the mother David was destined to have. At first reluctant to assume such a role, Inés eventually accepts this responsibility, even as David’s behavior puts him at odds with a series of educational institutions. Although this leads at the end of the first book to Inés and Simón’s fleeing with David, his resistance to all but the most unconventional forms of pedagogy persists in The Schooldays of Jesus, where David, now nearly 7, has enrolled in what is called the Academy of Dance. There he falls under the tutelage of a mysterious musician, Señor Arroyo, and his charismatic wife, Ana Magdalena, and can finally indulge his singular epistemology, which revolves around the notions that the only book worth reading is Don Quixote and that numbers are connected to the stars. When he performs his special “dance of Seven” at an academy gathering, the effect is uncanny: “As if the earth has lost its downward power, the boy seems to shed all bodily weight,” Simón observes, “to become pure light.”
As we make our way through The Schooldays of Jesus, we begin to realize there is more than just the ethereal to David. His resistance to learning and his difficult relationship with adults contain something other than trauma, something that seems to be almost a thought experiment on Coetzee’s part, a dismissal of theories of both nature and nurture in relation to the development of a child. Characters flit in and out of David’s penumbra, the other children reduced mostly to bit parts. Toward Simón, who often comes across as pedantic and affectless, David is willful and dismissive. Inés, he treats as his follower.
Then there is Dmitri, encountered first as a doorman at the Academy of Dance, a large, slovenly figure given to showing pornography to the children and fixated on Ana Magdalena. David, who seems strangely drawn to him, becomes even more interested after Dmitri sexually assaults and murders Ana Magdalena. A long, confusing trial leads not so much to Dmitri’s incarceration as to frequent encounters between him and David, whom Dmitri considers his “king.”
The Death of Jesus picks up their stories after the trial. With the Academy of Dance temporarily shut down, David takes to soccer. Revealing himself to be a gifted winger on the field, he is scouted by a man who runs an orphanage. David moves there, abandoning Simón and Inés, but his tenure as a player at the orphanage proves to be brief, and soon he is reacquainted with Dmitri: A mysterious ailment leads to a long hospitalization for David, and Dmitri resurfaces as a hospital worker. The doctors are unable to diagnose David’s illness, and midway through the novel comes the death signposted in the title. This is a bold move for any novelist, but David’s death brings no closure. Instead, the mystery continues, as Dmitri believes himself to be the sole recipient of a message from David, even if the content of that message, he writes in a long letter to Simón, “is still obscure.” For Simón, struggling with sorrow after David’s death and leafing through their copy of Don Quixote as if it were “a relic,” there is no message at all or at least none that can ever be known. The question of faith and its absence that we saw in Elizabeth Costello returns but in even more contradictory fashion, leaving us with almost nothing beyond the fact of the labor that has produced this puzzling trilogy.
Writing about the works produced in the twilight of an artist’s career, Edward Said marked out for special scrutiny those in which the artist’s “late style” was expressed “not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction.” Building on a phrase and idea taken from Adorno, Said used Ibsen to make his point. Ibsen’s final plays—in particular When We Dead Awaken—offer, in contrast with Shakespeare, not harmony, Said explains, but only “an occasion to stir up more anxiety, tamper irrevocably with the possibility of closure, and leave the audience more perplexed and unsettled than before.” As description, this seems quite apt for Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy, which raises so many questions and offers almost no definitive answers.
One wonders, for instance, in spite of the intermittent allegorical elements, whether the problem being wrestled with here is art rather than religion. It is an interpretation given some weight by the recurrent, quasi-talismanic status of Don Quixote and by the possible reading of David as a variation on its archetypal fictional protagonist as much as a version of Jesus of Nazareth, a boyish echo of the late knight of La Mancha. If David is adrift, it is perhaps also because he is traveling through a form that, while new to Cervantes, is undeniably worn some four centuries later in the hands of Coetzee.
Much of Coetzee’s career has, in fact, tilted at the windmills of literary realism. The struggle is there in his first book, 1974’s Dusklands, with its twinned but stylistically quite different novellas that take on the Vietnam War and colonialism in southern Africa. The campaign is continued in anti-apartheid works like Waiting for the Barbarians and Life and Times of Michael K. Only in his most popular novel, Disgrace, does he offer us something of an exception, one that comes across as the norm only because its thematically freighted realism—of white masculinity in postapartheid South Africa—was rewarded by prize committees, winning its author the Booker for a second time as well as reliable placement in liberal arts curricula everywhere.
Coetzee’s angular relationship with realism has grown only more acute after he was awarded the Nobel and moved from South Africa to Australia. His subsequent fictional works appear to campaign against realism with even greater intensity. Elizabeth Costello was followed by Slow Man, another novel about the aging body that also features Costello, who appears a third of the way through, claiming that its protagonist is a character in a novel she is working on. Coetzee’s challenge to the realist form found its most singular expression in 2007’s Diary of a Bad Year. Riffing on Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year—a work that suddenly has its own ominous valence—Coetzee produced not so much a novel as an extended set of essays on the modern state. The narrative element reduced mostly to footnotes, the main text of the novel involved a series of treatises by Señor C, a writer who, like Coetzee, has just immigrated to Australia from South Africa and who excoriates Anglo-American democracy for its self-congratulatory rhetoric even as it leaves in its wake the wreckage of the Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, and Guantánamo.
If not realist, though, there was no doubt that Coetzee was addressing the moment in Diary of a Bad Year. There was no escape or evasion here, only a fiercely moral intelligence that has been in operation since his earliest works of fiction, a courage to take on the same liberal Anglo-American world that has, by and large, celebrated his status as an artist. The Jesus trilogy, however, while rejecting realism, seems also to jettison the contemporary world. Readers must make their way through a series of novels that do not seem to pose political questions and whose metaphysics often appear to pertain to a realm far removed from that of humanity. There are barely any reference points, only a bewildering succession of Spanish names in a land that could be anywhere vaguely European and where all the characters—other than perhaps David, the boy knight-king—are devoid of memories.
So, just as the past is more or less absent, the present in the Jesus novels (and in particular the final one) is not fully substantial, either. In spite of the housing and work and food provided to new arrivals, everyone is in some deep sense unhoused. Different as the adult characters Simón, Inés, and Dmitri may be from one another, they all give the impression of wandering through the fragmentary remnants of modernity—the state, the novel, and realism. They are in exile in a manner that sidesteps the contemporary questions we thought in the beginning they were intended to examine: border control regimes, displaced people from the Global South, the new authoritarianism.
There is no reason to believe, given Coetzee’s long writing career, that he is not opposed to the latest manifestations of cruelty expressed by the modern state. But the Jesus novels also suggest that the estrangement felt by their characters—and by us as readers—while disquieting and profound, occupies an uneasy relationship to our alienation from the contemporary. In Diary of a Bad Year, Señor C talks about a helpless “quietism” that has become the norm for citizens of modern Western democracies, an “inner emigration.” But in writing an allegory that is barely an allegory and a trilogy of novels that are often not novels, Coetzee appears to have made his own literary displacement total, external as well as internal. Drawing on Adorno, Said spoke of difficult late works as constituting, for the intransigent artist, “a form of exile.” Coetzee’s late work is exemplary in that regard.