thenation--2020-06-23--‘To Embrace the Fucked-Up’: On Dodie Bellamy

Dodie Bellamy is the kind of writer one knows all or nothing about .
When friends asked what I was working on and I said , “ Reviewing a collection of essays about Dodie Bellamy ’ s work , ” they responded with either a blank stare or sudden , excited recognition .
Tempestuous conversations about Chris Kraus and Kathy Acker arose , along with nostalgic memories of the poet Kevin Killian , Bellamy ’ s late husband , and the archive-like San Francisco apartment they shared .
We discussed the beginnings of New Narrative , a literary movement started @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in which Bellamy , Killian , and Acker were key figures .
Pornography was a common topic , as was queer identity , transgression , cults , gentrification , and New Age .
If someone didn ’ t know Bellamy , then it was up to me to explain how she strings such topics together and to impress upon them why her writing is still so influential .
Dodie Bellamy Is on Our Mind Dodie Bellamy Is on Our Mind aims to address precisely this .
It is a collection of essays written @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her work by the Wattis Institute at California College of the Arts , presented with a previously unpublished project by Bellamy and Killian .
For the past six years , the institute has chosen one artist annually to consider in relation to the question “ How does this single artist ’ s work speak to broader questions about art , culture , and society today ?
” From September 2018 to August 2019 , a group of academics and peers held a select reading group to discuss Bellamy ’ s work , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ public through a series of monthly events .
These included a stage adaptation of a book of e-mail exchanges between Acker and writer McKenzie Wark , an evening of films by legendary underground filmmaker Mike Kuchar , a “ manifesto on nothingness ” by writer and professor Jack Halberstam threading Bellamy ’ s work to women ’ s writing about the domestic , and a reading by Bay Area writers who have studied with Bellamy .
To open the first event , a reading by poet and novelist Andrew Durbin of his essay @ @ @ @ @ @ @ director and chief curator Anthony Huberman read a selection of Bellamy-specific questions painted on the space ’ s back wall .
“ What is new about narrative ?
Is art ever honest ?
What is barf art ?
What does the vulgar have to do with the poetic ?
Where are the tiny revolts ?
” From the resulting essays and events , it ’ s clear that Bellamy ’ s work continues to inspire many writers , artists , and filmmakers with an interest in sexuality , progressive politics , and vulnerability @ @ @ @ @ @ @ talk about female desire… .
We take it for granted now .
In the ’ 90s we didn ’ t take it for granted , ” recalls the writer Diana Cage , formerly Bellamy ’ s assistant at Small Press Traffic , the San Francisco bookstore where New Narrative was born .
“ Dodie is the first place where I actually understood that [ female desire ] was a thing that needed to be described.
” The three essay authors in Dodie Bellamy Is on Our Mind take distinct approaches .
Megan Milks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ someone who has so thoroughly examined herself ?
” Milks spends time with Bellamy and others who know her well , including Killian , Cage , the artist Matias Viegener , and Bruce Boone , one of the first New Narrative writers , to define what her work has meant for this creative community .
Durbin writes in the collection ’ s second essay about Bellamy ’ s use of the personal “ I , ” a New Narrative strategy that centers the writer ’ s self and body , and how she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the divide between the personal and political .
In the third essay , Kaye Mitchell considers Bellamy ’ s embrace of vulnerability and vulgarity to examine how her work questions why women are made to feel shame for their femininity and sexuality .
All three circle around crudeness , discomfort , and human imperfection and the way Bellamy ’ s frankness in probing such topics makes her writing so enticing .
Even more enticing is her ability to include gossip , an inherent aspect of the New Narrative writers that , as Durbin @ @ @ @ @ @ @ only [ as ] a self , but a self among selves , a self constituted by—and constituent of—a community.
” This community is one of gay and queer artists , people from working-class backgrounds , feminists , and activists .
By centering the importance of relationships within these largely noninstitutional communities , her work takes a political stance against systems that rely on social assimilation , and alongside those who challenge the norm through even the smallest , most personal acts .
Tiny revolts .
Born in North Hammond , Indiana , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a poor working-class family .
A rebel from the beginning , she writes in her memoir the buddhist ( 2011 ) that she was precocious as a child .
In multiple essays , she revisits her strained relationship with her mother and how she felt from a young age that she did not fit in .
In Milks ’ s essay , “ Dodie Bellamy ’ s Crude Genius , ” Bellamy uses the word “ horrible ” to describe her relationship with her father , saying that he was verbally abusive and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her relationship with obscenity to him .
Bellamy had her first sexual encounter at age 11 at a sleepover with another girl .
She was a “ predatory girl who was coming on to all the girls at all the pajama parties , ” Bellamy tells Milks .
The girls ’ relationship morphed into a 15-year codependence , and they eventually joined a cult together , which Bellamy writes about in the essay “ Cultured ” which appeared in The TV Sutras ( 2014 ) .
“ It was a really fucked-up , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Bellamy tried to get out of it for years , and after she finally did at 26 , she realized the relationship had stunted her emotionally .
“ I had never individuated in certain ways , ” she says .
“ If I was upset , I had no inner resources on how to take care of myself.
” In the late 1970s , Bellamy left for San Francisco , where she became a core member of the Feminist Writers ’ Guild , a group of mostly middle- and upper-class women living in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
She describes meetings on sunny decks where the women fought over how to edit a group anthology , and members burst into tears .
“ These arguments bored me at the time , as I sat on the floor drunk and stoned , but now I look back on them with awe , the overtness , the trying to work through differences , the belief that classism was bad.
” She started attending classes taught by the feminist poet Kathleen Fraser , who encouraged Bellamy to look into a writing group led @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Press Traffic in the Mission District .
These weekly workshops became a place for writers who were disillusioned with the then-popular Language Poets , whose work emphasized a stark division between the writer of a piece and its voice .
This new group challenged that division , inserting subjectivity into the text and playing with , as Milks writes , “ the possibilities of loosely autobiographical storytelling to produce an exploded and unstable ‘ I.
’ ” Bellamy often uses this “ I ” to blur the boundary between writer and subject .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ her explanation in the buddhist : Breaking down the divide between what lies inside and outside a text creates “ an illusion of confession , ” as Bellamy writes in the essay “ Incarnation , ” to create “ intimacy , sometimes discomfort , in the reader.
” She blurs this divide to implicate the reader in a form of intimacy , like a friend trusting you with closest-held secrets .
Gossip plays a similar role as a literary device .
It disrupts the divide between the text and what lives outside it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ intimacy , community , and control .
Engaging with gossip places New Narrative works in conversation with one another while destabilizing any “ true ” course of events .
It also knits people together by building a narrative that is told by and for the community .
In his essay , Durban cites a definition of New Narrative that Bellamy and Killian provide in their introduction to the anthology Writers Who Love Too Much : “ It would be a writing prompted…by community ; it would be unafraid of experiment , unafraid of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and political debate.
” Durbin ties this definition to the activism that came out of the US government ’ s failure to respond adequately to the AIDS crisis , which intimately affected many New Narrative writers , and the community bonds that were forged for survival .
As Boone wrote in his seminal essay Century of Clouds ( 1980 ) , a kind of handbook for New Narrative , “ A relation is achieved between the one telling those stories and her or his audience and history… .
Let ’ s say these @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ideology and so on .
You want what you write to actually cause these to come to exist , you don ’ t want to just describe them.
” New Narrative writers aimed to bring friendship , power , and community off the page and into the real world .
By incorporating gossip , Bellamy ’ s works move beyond a simple description of a community to the construction of an inclusive organism that is being constantly negotiated and reformed—offering space for writers and artists , even decades later , to engage @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in hand with sex , because both offer ways she could locate herself within the world .
Huberman writes in Our Mind ’ s introduction , “ She doesn ’ t write poems or novels about sex but imagines ways the writing itself could contain a sexual force.
” Sex and bodily scenes often act as visceral moments that bleed into layers of self-reflection .
In one of her best-known essays , “ Barf Manifesto , ” included in the collection When the Sick Rule the World ( 2015 ) , she intertwines @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s essay “ Everyday Barf ” with an episode in which Bellamy horrifyingly clogs Myles ’ s toilet with paper towels .
Her intimate bodily functions—taking a dump in the privacy of her friend ’ s bathroom—flow into nonnative flora , dialects and class , US geography , cancer , and death .
She sets the scene with her “ horrible smelly poo ” which she calls “ my shame , ” a shame we all ( likely ) know .
She uses the scene to reflect on other moments of shame @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bodies that engage in similarly vulgar acts , in a society in which we are socialized to be ashamed .
Mitchell argues in the collection ’ s third essay that vulnerability and vulgarity are the dual forces that Bellamy uses to express her feminist framework .
In the buddhist Bellamy writes , “ An in-your-face owning of one ’ s vulnerability and fucked-upness to the point of embarassing and offending tight-asses is a powerful feminist strategy.
” Mitchell puts Bellamy ’ s writing into conversation with works by Chris Kraus , Marie Calloway @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , all of whom have practiced radical vulnerability in their work .
Rather than hide shameful female desires and anger , Bellamy exposes them : She expresses , as Cage puts it , the need for female desires to be written authentically , by women .
“ All the experimental poets who are putting blowjobs into their poems , ” says Bellamy , “ should understand that that wasn ’ t always the case.
” Because of writers like her , it is now so normal to hear sexual content at a poetry @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mundane .
Vulnerability and sexual content are touchstones of younger generations ’ use of the Internet , far beyond what anyone would have anticipated in the era of dial-up .
On Twitter , raunchy tweets are just a scroll down from political rants and professional updates .
Our posts get all scrambled together into one big cesspool , the good , the vulgar , and the vulnerable—a natural extension of Bellamy ’ s mix of low and high culture writing and a perhaps natural progression of creative expression to deal with living in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ final piece in the collection is the only one written , at least in part , by Bellamy .
It is a collaborative project that she and Killian began when he was diagnosed with cancer .
They began to alternate choosing a theme every week—say , “ Sylvia Plath ” or “ drawing ” —and together would write 1,000 words .
They planned to continue for one year , but after only seven weeks , Bellamy was writing from his hospital room .
The pieces read like conversations between two people who know @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to shared people and history , retelling stories they both know and arguing about the details .
They do not address Killian ’ s precarious health until that seventh week , themed “ Now.
” Kevin discusses chemotherapy ( “ I honestly thought that chemotherapy was not going to be a big deal ” ) and the poetry world ( “ I realize that the struggles of poetry led me into a hideous depression that wound up giving me cancer ” ) .
The piece ends when doctors arrive to insert a breathing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from Killian again .
The last two passages are naked , raw vulnerability .
Bellamy writes in the first person “ I ” to “ you , ” Killian , narrating for him their last few days together .
In the final passage , the poets Ariana Reines and Julian Brolaski visit their room , and Reines sings them a song .
Returning to the book ’ s driving question— “ How does this single artist ’ s work speak to broader questions about art , culture , and society today ?
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ work , along with Killian ’ s and other New Narrative writers ’ , continues to inspire generations of artists to produce work that glories in vulnerability , creating its own kind of community .
The final Wattis event for Bellamy , in August 2019 , was both a tribute to Killian ’ s life and the relaunch of a magazine that they began together in 1985 , Mirage .
The revived magazine is called Mirage # 5/Period ( ical ) and is filled with writing by a new generation of New Narrative–inspired @ @ @ @ @ @ @ through their writing , a community that has grown off the page and into the world .

Dodie Bellamy is the kind of writer one knows all or nothing about. When friends asked what I was working on and I said, “Reviewing a collection of essays about Dodie Bellamy’s work,” they responded with either a blank stare or sudden, excited recognition. Tempestuous conversations about Chris Kraus and Kathy Acker arose, along with nostalgic memories of the poet Kevin Killian, Bellamy’s late husband, and the archive-like San Francisco apartment they shared. We discussed the beginnings of New Narrative, a literary movement started in San Francisco in the late 1970s in which Bellamy, Killian, and Acker were key figures. Pornography was a common topic, as was queer identity, transgression, cults, gentrification, and New Age. If someone didn’t know Bellamy, then it was up to me to explain how she strings such topics together and to impress upon them why her writing is still so influential. Books in Review Dodie Bellamy Is on Our Mind By Jeanne Gerrity and Anthony Huberman (Editors) Buy this book
Dodie Bellamy Is on Our Mind aims to address precisely this. It is a collection of essays written in conjunction with a yearlong celebration of her work by the Wattis Institute at California College of the Arts, presented with a previously unpublished project by Bellamy and Killian. For the past six years, the institute has chosen one artist annually to consider in relation to the question “How does this single artist’s work speak to broader questions about art, culture, and society today?” From September 2018 to August 2019, a group of academics and peers held a select reading group to discuss Bellamy’s work, a discussion which was later opened to the public through a series of monthly events. These included a stage adaptation of a book of e-mail exchanges between Acker and writer McKenzie Wark, an evening of films by legendary underground filmmaker Mike Kuchar, a “manifesto on nothingness” by writer and professor Jack Halberstam threading Bellamy’s work to women’s writing about the domestic, and a reading by Bay Area writers who have studied with Bellamy.
To open the first event, a reading by poet and novelist Andrew Durbin of his essay “Tiny Revolts,” Wattis Institute director and chief curator Anthony Huberman read a selection of Bellamy-specific questions painted on the space’s back wall. “What is new about narrative? Is art ever honest? What is barf art? What does the vulgar have to do with the poetic? Where are the tiny revolts?”
From the resulting essays and events, it’s clear that Bellamy’s work continues to inspire many writers, artists, and filmmakers with an interest in sexuality, progressive politics, and vulnerability. “Even the way that people talk about female desire…. We take it for granted now. In the ’90s we didn’t take it for granted,” recalls the writer Diana Cage, formerly Bellamy’s assistant at Small Press Traffic, the San Francisco bookstore where New Narrative was born. “Dodie is the first place where I actually understood that [female desire] was a thing that needed to be described.”
The three essay authors in Dodie Bellamy Is on Our Mind take distinct approaches. Megan Milks asks, “How does one profile someone who has so thoroughly examined herself?” Milks spends time with Bellamy and others who know her well, including Killian, Cage, the artist Matias Viegener, and Bruce Boone, one of the first New Narrative writers, to define what her work has meant for this creative community. Durbin writes in the collection’s second essay about Bellamy’s use of the personal “I,” a New Narrative strategy that centers the writer’s self and body, and how she places herself within a community to bridge the divide between the personal and political. In the third essay, Kaye Mitchell considers Bellamy’s embrace of vulnerability and vulgarity to examine how her work questions why women are made to feel shame for their femininity and sexuality. 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
All three circle around crudeness, discomfort, and human imperfection and the way Bellamy’s frankness in probing such topics makes her writing so enticing. Even more enticing is her ability to include gossip, an inherent aspect of the New Narrative writers that, as Durbin observes, presents the author “not only [as] a self, but a self among selves, a self constituted by—and constituent of—a community.” This community is one of gay and queer artists, people from working-class backgrounds, feminists, and activists. By centering the importance of relationships within these largely noninstitutional communities, her work takes a political stance against systems that rely on social assimilation, and alongside those who challenge the norm through even the smallest, most personal acts. Tiny revolts.
Born in North Hammond, Indiana, in 1951, Bellamy grew up in a poor working-class family. A rebel from the beginning, she writes in her memoir the buddhist (2011) that she was precocious as a child.
Over and over on my grade school report cards, one snooty teacher after another wrote “Doris has a bad attitude.” These comments were a source of shame for me, and threats from my mother to stop my damned pouting and behave myself.
In multiple essays, she revisits her strained relationship with her mother and how she felt from a young age that she did not fit in. In Milks’s essay, “Dodie Bellamy’s Crude Genius,” Bellamy uses the word “horrible” to describe her relationship with her father, saying that he was verbally abusive and sexually inappropriate, and that she traces her relationship with obscenity to him. Related Article Mary Gaitskill’s Art of Loneliness Maggie Doherty
Bellamy had her first sexual encounter at age 11 at a sleepover with another girl. She was a “predatory girl who was coming on to all the girls at all the pajama parties,” Bellamy tells Milks. The girls’ relationship morphed into a 15-year codependence, and they eventually joined a cult together, which Bellamy writes about in the essay “Cultured” which appeared in The TV Sutras (2014). “It was a really fucked-up, unhealthy relationship,” she says. Bellamy tried to get out of it for years, and after she finally did at 26, she realized the relationship had stunted her emotionally. “I had never individuated in certain ways,” she says. “If I was upset, I had no inner resources on how to take care of myself.”
In the late 1970s, Bellamy left for San Francisco, where she became a core member of the Feminist Writers’ Guild, a group of mostly middle- and upper-class women living in Marin, Berkeley, and San Francisco. She describes meetings on sunny decks where the women fought over how to edit a group anthology, and members burst into tears. “These arguments bored me at the time, as I sat on the floor drunk and stoned, but now I look back on them with awe, the overtness, the trying to work through differences, the belief that classism was bad.”
She started attending classes taught by the feminist poet Kathleen Fraser, who encouraged Bellamy to look into a writing group led by the poet Robert Glück at Small Press Traffic in the Mission District. These weekly workshops became a place for writers who were disillusioned with the then-popular Language Poets, whose work emphasized a stark division between the writer of a piece and its voice. This new group challenged that division, inserting subjectivity into the text and playing with, as Milks writes, “the possibilities of loosely autobiographical storytelling to produce an exploded and unstable ‘I.’”
Bellamy often uses this “I” to blur the boundary between writer and subject. The most fitting visualization of this is her explanation in the buddhist:
Intradiegetic refers to the reality that exists within the narrative of a movie or fiction. The plot, characters, dialogue, etc. Extradiegetic refers to elements that exist outside that narrative. A first person narrator would be intradiegetic, whereas an omniscient narrator would be extradiegetic. The musical score to a film, which presumably the characters can’t hear, would be extradiegetic. If a work is based on something from “real life,” the audience’s pre-existing knowledge of the events would be extradiegetic, as would the audience’s familiarity with the life of the actors…. New Narrative…[is all] about problematizing and confusing the division between intra- and extra- diegetic.
Breaking down the divide between what lies inside and outside a text creates “an illusion of confession,” as Bellamy writes in the essay “Incarnation,” to create “intimacy, sometimes discomfort, in the reader.” She blurs this divide to implicate the reader in a form of intimacy, like a friend trusting you with closest-held secrets.
Gossip plays a similar role as a literary device. It disrupts the divide between the text and what lives outside it, playing with levels of knowledge, intimacy, community, and control. Engaging with gossip places New Narrative works in conversation with one another while destabilizing any “true” course of events. It also knits people together by building a narrative that is told by and for the community. In his essay, Durban cites a definition of New Narrative that Bellamy and Killian provide in their introduction to the anthology Writers Who Love Too Much: “It would be a writing prompted…by community; it would be unafraid of experiment, unafraid of kitsch, unafraid of sex and gossip and political debate.” Durbin ties this definition to the activism that came out of the US government’s failure to respond adequately to the AIDS crisis, which intimately affected many New Narrative writers, and the community bonds that were forged for survival.
As Boone wrote in his seminal essay Century of Clouds (1980), a kind of handbook for New Narrative, “A relation is achieved between the one telling those stories and her or his audience and history…. Let’s say these ‘themes’ become power, friendship, ideology and so on. You want what you write to actually cause these to come to exist, you don’t want to just describe them.” New Narrative writers aimed to bring friendship, power, and community off the page and into the real world. By incorporating gossip, Bellamy’s works move beyond a simple description of a community to the construction of an inclusive organism that is being constantly negotiated and reformed—offering space for writers and artists, even decades later, to engage with..
For Bellamy, gossip went hand in hand with sex, because both offer ways she could locate herself within the world. Huberman writes in Our Mind’s introduction, “She doesn’t write poems or novels about sex but imagines ways the writing itself could contain a sexual force.” Sex and bodily scenes often act as visceral moments that bleed into layers of self-reflection. In one of her best-known essays, “Barf Manifesto,” included in the collection When the Sick Rule the World (2015), she intertwines a critique of her friend Eileen Myles’s essay “Everyday Barf” with an episode in which Bellamy horrifyingly clogs Myles’s toilet with paper towels.
The water finally goes down and I flush and the toilet fills up again with my horrible smelly poo, my shame, and Eileen’s in the doorway barking, keep pumping, pump until all the water’s gone, and I argue that it’s not going to work and Eileen argues that’s what she did in New York, and I’m flopping about and sweating and pumping…. Outside grow all these weird tropical plants imported from Hawaii…. Fake is my word for sure, the way my mom called nonindigenous plants “foreign plants,” she said it with a scowl, “those foreign plants,” which so perfectly sums up the conservative Midwestern America I grew up in, for hours I watched my mother gasp and jerk her head to the left, each breath was like this big event, gasp jerk pause gasp jerk pause and the nurses assured me this was a peaceful cancer death and I believed them–gasping and jerking my mother was at peace–I had to believe them.
Her intimate bodily functions—taking a dump in the privacy of her friend’s bathroom—flow into nonnative flora, dialects and class, US geography, cancer, and death. She sets the scene with her “horrible smelly poo” which she calls “my shame,” a shame we all (likely) know. She uses the scene to reflect on other moments of shame, showing that we all live in bodies that engage in similarly vulgar acts, in a society in which we are socialized to be ashamed.
Mitchell argues in the collection’s third essay that vulnerability and vulgarity are the dual forces that Bellamy uses to express her feminist framework. In the buddhist Bellamy writes, “An in-your-face owning of one’s vulnerability and fucked-upness to the point of embarassing and offending tight-asses is a powerful feminist strategy.” Mitchell puts Bellamy’s writing into conversation with works by Chris Kraus, Marie Calloway, Sophie Calle, and Carolee Schneemann, all of whom have practiced radical vulnerability in their work. Rather than hide shameful female desires and anger, Bellamy exposes them:
To embrace the fucked-up, to move towards a maturity and strength that can include and express weakness and embarrassing content of all sorts without shame, to allow myself the full resonance of being a female subject…living in a fucked up nation, in a fucked up world, in the 21st century.
She expresses, as Cage puts it, the need for female desires to be written authentically, by women. “All the experimental poets who are putting blowjobs into their poems,” says Bellamy, “should understand that that wasn’t always the case.” Because of writers like her, it is now so normal to hear sexual content at a poetry reading that it has become a bit mundane. Vulnerability and sexual content are touchstones of younger generations’ use of the Internet, far beyond what anyone would have anticipated in the era of dial-up. On Twitter, raunchy tweets are just a scroll down from political rants and professional updates. Our posts get all scrambled together into one big cesspool, the good, the vulgar, and the vulnerable—a natural extension of Bellamy’s mix of low and high culture writing and a perhaps natural progression of creative expression to deal with living in such an inherently fucked-up world.
The final piece in the collection is the only one written, at least in part, by Bellamy. It is a collaborative project that she and Killian began when he was diagnosed with cancer. They began to alternate choosing a theme every week—say, “Sylvia Plath” or “drawing”—and together would write 1,000 words. They planned to continue for one year, but after only seven weeks, Bellamy was writing from his hospital room.
The pieces read like conversations between two people who know each other profoundly well. They refer to shared people and history, retelling stories they both know and arguing about the details. They do not address Killian’s precarious health until that seventh week, themed “Now.” Kevin discusses chemotherapy (“I honestly thought that chemotherapy was not going to be a big deal”) and the poetry world (“I realize that the struggles of poetry led me into a hideous depression that wound up giving me cancer”). The piece ends when doctors arrive to insert a breathing tube. We don’t hear from Killian again.
The last two passages are naked, raw vulnerability. Bellamy writes in the first person “I” to “you,” Killian, narrating for him their last few days together. In the final passage, the poets Ariana Reines and Julian Brolaski visit their room, and Reines sings them a song.
Returning to the book’s driving question—“How does this single artist’s work speak to broader questions about art, culture, and society today?”—it is clear that Bellamy’s work, along with Killian’s and other New Narrative writers’, continues to inspire generations of artists to produce work that glories in vulnerability, creating its own kind of community. The final Wattis event for Bellamy, in August 2019, was both a tribute to Killian’s life and the relaunch of a magazine that they began together in 1985, Mirage. The revived magazine is called Mirage #5/Period(ical) and is filled with writing by a new generation of New Narrative–inspired artists. They’ve manifested, through their writing, a community that has grown off the page and into the world.


thenation--2020-06-23--We Need Police Out of Our Schools—Now

We Need Police Out of Our Schools—Now

On June 2 , in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by a police officer , the Minneapolis Public Schools school board voted to terminate the Minneapolis Police Department ’ s contract , removing all police from their schools .
The board also directed Superintendent Ed Graff to come up with a new plan for school safety by August 18 , the date of the board ’ s next meeting .
While the uprising in response to the murder of George Floyd was the immediate catalyst to the removal of police from MPS , many youth had been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ A 2018–19 survey by Minneapolis Public Schools survey showed that school cops had more interactions with black students than with their peers .
MPS will save $ 1.1 million annually by not contracting with the police department .
On June 7 , Seattle high school teacher and author Jesse Hagopian interviewed Minneapolis Public School student Nathaniel Genene about the uprising in Minneapolis against police violence and the movement to remove police from the schools .
Nathaniel is the current student representative on the Minneapolis Board of Education and an officer on the citywide @ @ @ @ @ @ @ schools .
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity .
esse agopian : Thanks for taking the time to talk to me , Nathaniel .
I know with the uprising at your doorstep , you have a lot going on .
I want to talk with you about the dramatic victory to remove police from the Minneapolis schools .
But before we get there , let ’ s start with your experience as a black student in the school system .
Can you talk about how you have experienced racism at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ start by looking at what happened even just two days after the murder of George Floyd—these are nights where I wasn ’ t going to bed .
I couldn ’ t get my mind off his murder .
And I had a teacher message me , the only black man in class , “ Nathaniel , if you are an IB diploma candidate , it is not reasonable to skip these exercises .
I understand if you ’ re struggling , but if it ’ s simply because you have already passed , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I was doing , he assumed I just wasn ’ t trying .
But I was hurting .
And I knew a lot of students of color were hurting as well .
And that was definitely really frustrating .
This kind of experience , of teachers not understanding the impact of racial violence on students or taking the time to really understand me , is not new for me or for black students across the country .
I did say something back to the teacher to let him know what I was going @ @ @ @ @ @ @ apology out to the class .
But that was really frustrating .
As far as encounters with school resource officers , I ’ ve never personally had an encounter with the school resource officer at Washburn [ High School ] .
In fact , I never even got to know his name—which shows you that he certainly wasn ’ t a helpful or supportive presence at our school .
And I know many students who felt uncomfortable and intimidated by having him there .
But especially now , I just can ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ officers would be beneficial to a school ’ s climate after the incidents that occurred last week , with students literally witnessing and recording a white officer putting his knee on an unarmed black man ’ s neck , students getting pepper-sprayed , teargassed , shot with rubber bullets in the streets by MPD officers .
JH : I ’ m truly inspired by the bravery of the youth in Minneapolis who took to the streets and helped lead a movement against police terror .
It would have been outrageous to have to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by a cop in the hall who had assaulted you .
Can you tell me about how you got involved in struggles to change education , and how you came to serve as the student representative on the school board ?
NG : I have always believed in student voice and in amplifying and uplifting the voices of the most unheard students .
I think that is really the most valuable thing a student rep can do .
I started interning at an educational nonprofit last summer .
Our goal was to redesign @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ re at the center of education .
That made me think more deeply about how to engage students and what student voice really means .
So going into the school year , I was thinking about : How do we engage students in their own education ?
And it ’ s usually very tokenizing , or it ’ s just about checking a box .
I wanted to make sure that we did it differently this time .
And I thought the easiest way to do that would be running to be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
And here I am today .
This story was produced for Student Nation , a section devoted to highlighting campus activism and student movements from students in their own words .
For more Student Nation , check out our archive .
Are you a student with a campus activism story ?
Send questions and pitches to Samantha Schuyler at samantha @ thenation.com .
The Student Nation program is made possible through generous funding from The Puffin Foundation .
JH : How did you come to see the video of George Floyd , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
How are you coping with the horror of the video ?
Have you been to the protests with your classmates ?
NG : Tuesday morning I woke up to the video of George Floyd ’ s murder , like a lot of people .
I had a Zoom meeting that morning , but I literally couldn ’ t get off Twitter .
I couldn ’ t get off the news .
I literally just kept watching it .
It got to be too much , so I just left the meeting .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Chicago where George Floyd was murdered .
At that time there were only 25 or 30 people down there .
I actually never got out of the car .
I just kind of went to see the scene and pay my respects and reflect .
I ’ ll be honest , I literally couldn ’ t believe it , so I had to go down there and see that corner for myself to believe it .
I have also gone to a couple of the demonstrations .
But to watch the struggle explode @ @ @ @ @ @ @ city and across the country has been inspiring .
It ’ s been very motivating—but it ’ s also been quite terrifying at times .
There were times last week , there were days last week and nights where you go on social media and there were threats of white supremacists in my neighborhood .
I have gone entire nights without sleeping .
So , last week was really hard , but it was the first week in a while where I actually got to see and talk to my friends in person @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to reflect on all of this with friends .
JH : I am so glad you are finding ways to stay emotionally connected with your friends .
NG : For sure .
I have also gone back to 38th and Chicago about four times to go see the memorial .
I took my family and I even got to take my little cousin .
I also went with friends .
I keep going down there thinking that it ’ ll make me feel better , but it really hasn ’ t .
And @ @ @ @ @ @ @ feeling that I have right now will ever go away , but it still has been nice to go with family and friends and kind of reconnect after being so isolated and disconnected the last couple of months .
JH : Let ’ s talk about how the youth in Minneapolis organized this effort to get police out of schools .
I understand that there ’ s been a movement for some time to remove police from schools , that this didn ’ t just start after George Floyd was killed .
NG @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to point out that this has been a generational struggle .
We ’ ve had cops in schools since the ’ 60s .
So this movement definitely did not start last week .
And groups today such as Young Peoples Action Coalition [ YPAC ] , Our Turn , and Youth Out Loud have been working on this issue for some time .
But watching the protests , I knew we had to make this struggle the number one priority .
It was last Wednesday , one of those nights where I couldn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ friends of mine get shot and teargassed , and I was thinking : There ’ s no way that when we come back to school we can have those officers in our schools .
This is not how we are going to want to set up our school climate .
So that ’ s when we really got started talking , we had some very good leadership on this at MPS , and they actually decided to have a special session and to vote on this on June 2 .
We had to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ matter of days .
So I sat down with a student from CityWide , our student leadership board in Minneapolis , and talked about how we could gather student testimonies , about their views on police in schools , in just a week .
I knew I wouldn ’ t be doing my due diligence just by telling students , “ Go e-mail your directors.
” We decided we needed to make a survey form about police in schools and school safety—and we actually borrowed this idea from the teachers ’ union .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ advocacy groups , such as Our Turn and YPAC , and through our citywide student government .
And it ended up spreading a lot quicker than I had thought .
We ended up getting over 1,800 responses , which is crazy , because that was in a matter of about three days .
We could have gotten even more if we had just made an online petition that anyone could respond to , but we really wanted to know what the students had to say .
We asked students questions like , “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ changes , and if you had the funds to make yourself feel safe and secure , what would you use that money for ?
” And I think those received the most meaningful responses .
So we made a summary of the responses and presented that to the board .
Hopefully over the next couple of months , while we start working on how to make sure that students feel safe next year , we can start using those responses to help craft a plan .
JH : Actually asking students what they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ funding it—seems so straightforward but so rarely happens .
Can you tell me about what happened during the vote to remove police from the Minneapolis Public Schools ?
NG : On June 2 , we held a virtual meeting because we ’ re actually not allowed to be in person yet .
But there was a huge protest at the Davis Center , which is our headquarters at MPS .
Our teacher ’ s union organized the rally , and Congresswoman Ilhan Omar was there .
She spoke at the rally and many @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the vote to remove all police from Minneapolis Public Schools went 9-0 .
I think the vote going unanimous really sent a clear message to the MPD and to institutions across the country .
JH : As I ’ m sure you have seen in the days right after your vote , Portland also voted to remove police and Denver is now considering it .
I am working with youth and other educators to remove the police from schools here in Seattle .
There are also several important national organizations that have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ schools such as the Advancement Project , Dignity in Schools , and Black Lives Matter at School .
NG : Yes , and there was a student group , Students Deserve , that reached out to me from Los Angeles .
JH : I want to end with the vision of the students in the survey .
What did they say about how police-free schools could make them safer , and what kind of alternative programs could be put in place to support students ’ overall well-being ?
What would it look like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ NG : Students came up with many important alternatives to police in schools , like increasing access to mental health services for black , indigenous , and students of color ; promoting restorative justice and the use of restorative justice practices ; hiring more social workers , counselors , and teachers of color ; increasing the salaries of adults who already mitigate conflict , and security provided through community outlets .
In terms of what more we need to do to make black lives matter at school , I believe we need to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we must make sure that we have a curriculum that reflects our students , especially our black and brown students .
This uprising is showing us that we can make those changes and so many more .
We have to make these changes because our lives are at stake all around the country .
If you think that the MPD just happens to be one bad apple , you ’ re not that much different than the people who think that those four cops who murdered George Floyd were four bad apples .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ problem .
It ’ s a nationwide , systemic problem that people have been fighting against for years .
If there ’ s one thing that I ’ ve learned in the last couple of weeks , it ’ s that there are a lot of really good people who continue to hold up some really bad institutions and policies .
And I think it ’ s finally time for that to change .

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On June 2, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by a police officer, the Minneapolis Public Schools school board voted to terminate the Minneapolis Police Department’s contract, removing all police from their schools. The board also directed Superintendent Ed Graff to come up with a new plan for school safety by August 18, the date of the board’s next meeting.
While the uprising in response to the murder of George Floyd was the immediate catalyst to the removal of police from MPS, many youth had been working toward this goal for years. A 2018–19 survey by Minneapolis Public Schools survey showed that school cops had more interactions with black students than with their peers. MPS will save $1.1 million annually by not contracting with the police department.
On June 7, Seattle high school teacher and author Jesse Hagopian interviewed Minneapolis Public School student Nathaniel Genene about the uprising in Minneapolis against police violence and the movement to remove police from the schools. Nathaniel is the current student representative on the Minneapolis Board of Education and an officer on the citywide Youth Leadership Council for the Minneapolis public schools.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
—Jesse Hagopian
J esse H agopian: Thanks for taking the time to talk to me, Nathaniel. I know with the uprising at your doorstep, you have a lot going on. I want to talk with you about the dramatic victory to remove police from the Minneapolis schools. But before we get there, let’s start with your experience as a black student in the school system. Can you talk about how you have experienced racism at school?
N athaniel G enene: We can start by looking at what happened even just two days after the murder of George Floyd—these are nights where I wasn’t going to bed. I couldn’t get my mind off his murder. And I had a teacher message me, the only black man in class, “Nathaniel, if you are an IB diploma candidate, it is not reasonable to skip these exercises. I understand if you’re struggling, but if it’s simply because you have already passed, well…” Current Issue View our current issue
Instead of finding out how I was doing, he assumed I just wasn’t trying. But I was hurting. And I knew a lot of students of color were hurting as well. And that was definitely really frustrating. This kind of experience, of teachers not understanding the impact of racial violence on students or taking the time to really understand me, is not new for me or for black students across the country. I did say something back to the teacher to let him know what I was going through, and he did send an apology out to the class. But that was really frustrating. 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 far as encounters with school resource officers, I’ve never personally had an encounter with the school resource officer at Washburn [High School]. In fact, I never even got to know his name—which shows you that he certainly wasn’t a helpful or supportive presence at our school. And I know many students who felt uncomfortable and intimidated by having him there. But especially now, I just can’t imagine a climate or culture where MPD officers would be beneficial to a school’s climate after the incidents that occurred last week, with students literally witnessing and recording a white officer putting his knee on an unarmed black man’s neck, students getting pepper-sprayed, teargassed, shot with rubber bullets in the streets by MPD officers.
JH: I’m truly inspired by the bravery of the youth in Minneapolis who took to the streets and helped lead a movement against police terror. It would have been outrageous to have to return to school and have to walk by a cop in the hall who had assaulted you. Can you tell me about how you got involved in struggles to change education, and how you came to serve as the student representative on the school board?
NG: I have always believed in student voice and in amplifying and uplifting the voices of the most unheard students. I think that is really the most valuable thing a student rep can do. I started interning at an educational nonprofit last summer. Our goal was to redesign schools so that students lead lessons—and they’re at the center of education. That made me think more deeply about how to engage students and what student voice really means. So going into the school year, I was thinking about: How do we engage students in their own education? And it’s usually very tokenizing, or it’s just about checking a box. I wanted to make sure that we did it differently this time. And I thought the easiest way to do that would be running to be the student rep on the school board. And here I am today. This story was produced for Student Nation, a section devoted to highlighting campus activism and student movements from students in their own words. For more Student Nation, check out our archive. Are you a student with a campus activism story? Send questions and pitches to Samantha Schuyler at [email protected]. The Student Nation program is made possible through generous funding from The Puffin Foundation.
JH: How did you come to see the video of George Floyd, and how you have been since then? How are you coping with the horror of the video? Have you been to the protests with your classmates?
NG: Tuesday morning I woke up to the video of George Floyd’s murder, like a lot of people. I had a Zoom meeting that morning, but I literally couldn’t get off Twitter. I couldn’t get off the news. I literally just kept watching it. It got to be too much, so I just left the meeting. I actually drove down to 38th and Chicago where George Floyd was murdered. At that time there were only 25 or 30 people down there.
I actually never got out of the car. I just kind of went to see the scene and pay my respects and reflect. I’ll be honest, I literally couldn’t believe it, so I had to go down there and see that corner for myself to believe it. I have also gone to a couple of the demonstrations.
But to watch the struggle explode into what it has become across the city and across the country has been inspiring. It’s been very motivating—but it’s also been quite terrifying at times. There were times last week, there were days last week and nights where you go on social media and there were threats of white supremacists in my neighborhood. I have gone entire nights without sleeping. So, last week was really hard, but it was the first week in a while where I actually got to see and talk to my friends in person, and it did help a lot to reflect on all of this with friends.
JH: I am so glad you are finding ways to stay emotionally connected with your friends.
NG: For sure. I have also gone back to 38th and Chicago about four times to go see the memorial. I took my family and I even got to take my little cousin. I also went with friends. I keep going down there thinking that it’ll make me feel better, but it really hasn’t. And I don’t know if this feeling that I have right now will ever go away, but it still has been nice to go with family and friends and kind of reconnect after being so isolated and disconnected the last couple of months.
JH: Let’s talk about how the youth in Minneapolis organized this effort to get police out of schools. I understand that there’s been a movement for some time to remove police from schools, that this didn’t just start after George Floyd was killed.
NG: I think it’s important to point out that this has been a generational struggle. We’ve had cops in schools since the ’60s. So this movement definitely did not start last week. And groups today such as Young Peoples Action Coalition [YPAC], Our Turn, and Youth Out Loud have been working on this issue for some time.
But watching the protests, I knew we had to make this struggle the number one priority. It was last Wednesday, one of those nights where I couldn’t go to sleep, watching friends of mine get shot and teargassed, and I was thinking: There’s no way that when we come back to school we can have those officers in our schools. This is not how we are going to want to set up our school climate.
So that’s when we really got started talking, we had some very good leadership on this at MPS, and they actually decided to have a special session and to vote on this on June 2. We had to prepare for this important vote in a matter of days. So I sat down with a student from CityWide, our student leadership board in Minneapolis, and talked about how we could gather student testimonies, about their views on police in schools, in just a week. I knew I wouldn’t be doing my due diligence just by telling students, “Go e-mail your directors.”
We decided we needed to make a survey form about police in schools and school safety—and we actually borrowed this idea from the teachers’ union. We reached out to students through many advocacy groups, such as Our Turn and YPAC, and through our citywide student government. And it ended up spreading a lot quicker than I had thought. We ended up getting over 1,800 responses, which is crazy, because that was in a matter of about three days.
We could have gotten even more if we had just made an online petition that anyone could respond to, but we really wanted to know what the students had to say. We asked students questions like, “If you had the funds to make changes, and if you had the funds to make yourself feel safe and secure, what would you use that money for?” And I think those received the most meaningful responses. So we made a summary of the responses and presented that to the board. Hopefully over the next couple of months, while we start working on how to make sure that students feel safe next year, we can start using those responses to help craft a plan.
JH: Actually asking students what they would need to feel safe and then funding it—seems so straightforward but so rarely happens. Can you tell me about what happened during the vote to remove police from the Minneapolis Public Schools?
NG: On June 2, we held a virtual meeting because we’re actually not allowed to be in person yet. But there was a huge protest at the Davis Center, which is our headquarters at MPS. Our teacher’s union organized the rally, and Congresswoman Ilhan Omar was there. She spoke at the rally and many students did too. In the end, the vote to remove all police from Minneapolis Public Schools went 9-0. I think the vote going unanimous really sent a clear message to the MPD and to institutions across the country.
JH: As I’m sure you have seen in the days right after your vote, Portland also voted to remove police and Denver is now considering it. I am working with youth and other educators to remove the police from schools here in Seattle. There are also several important national organizations that have been working hard to remove police from schools such as the Advancement Project, Dignity in Schools, and Black Lives Matter at School.
NG: Yes, and there was a student group, Students Deserve, that reached out to me from Los Angeles.
JH: I want to end with the vision of the students in the survey. What did they say about how police-free schools could make them safer, and what kind of alternative programs could be put in place to support students’ overall well-being? What would it look like if black lives mattered in school?
NG: Students came up with many important alternatives to police in schools, like increasing access to mental health services for black, indigenous, and students of color; promoting restorative justice and the use of restorative justice practices; hiring more social workers, counselors, and teachers of color; increasing the salaries of adults who already mitigate conflict, and security provided through community outlets.
In terms of what more we need to do to make black lives matter at school, I believe we need to hire more teachers of color. And we must make sure that we have a curriculum that reflects our students, especially our black and brown students. This uprising is showing us that we can make those changes and so many more. We have to make these changes because our lives are at stake all around the country. If you think that the MPD just happens to be one bad apple, you’re not that much different than the people who think that those four cops who murdered George Floyd were four bad apples. It’s not just a Minnesota problem. It’s a nationwide, systemic problem that people have been fighting against for years.
If there’s one thing that I’ve learned in the last couple of weeks, it’s that there are a lot of really good people who continue to hold up some really bad institutions and policies. And I think it’s finally time for that to change.


thenation--2020-06-23--The US Military Also Has a Racism Problem

Recently , in this Black Lives Matter protest moment , my 5-year-old son looked at me and asked , “ Mommy , where did all the brown people go ?
Did the police here shoot them ?
” We ’ d just moved to the outskirts of a more affluent rural town from a city where my son and 3-and-a-half-year-old daughter mixed daily with black , Latino , and Asian American kids and were among a minority of whites at their preschool .
Now , it was whites to the horizon : the white UPS guy , the white neighbors @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of us , the white motorcycle gangs zooming down the road in front of our house , sometimes sporting Confederate flags on their seat backs .
As I fumbled to explain racism , the general mistreatment of people of color , income inequality , and redlining in the simplest terms I could imagine , my son tried to clarify things : “ So white people steal ?
Is that what they use the guns for ?
” In his young life he ’ s already absorbed way too much talk of guns , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the news he catches in passing , as well as discussions of my husband ’ s work on nuclear and ballistic-missile submarines and now as a Pentagon official , not to speak of my own work as a therapist in military communities , a human rights activist , and the cofounder of the Costs of War Project .
I think , by now , he assumes that things in this country happen mainly thanks to the brute force of white guys with guns .
At his young age , he already struggles @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be treated badly because of the way you look .
Late the other night , when he should have been asleep , he called me in and asked , “ Mommy , what does it feel like when someone kneels on your neck ?
” And when , while riding in our car with the radio news on , he heard about the pepper spraying of protesters in Lafayette Square near the White House , he asked , “ Was that coronavirus they were spraying ?
Does that make you not breathe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
” Later , he wondered aloud : “ Does Daddy have a gun ?
Is he scared ?
” I guess it ’ s logical enough for the child of a man who has served on three subs and an aircraft carrier during his 17-year naval career to assume that the people with power and the mandate to kill are white men .
Certainly , whenever we ’ ve attended a Navy gathering , we invariably face a sea of white officers and their white , J.Crew-clad wives .
And—not to cast @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we belong on the cover of a muesli box with our pale skin , fair hair , and long , well-nourished limbs .
The rare people of color we ’ ve come to know among the officer class in the Navy have had their own stories to tell about the commonplace nature of the racial slurs like “ raghead ” they ’ ve heard in the service and of being threatened with racially motivated violence by peers and higher-ups alike , sometimes under the guise of “ training ” exercises .
To report @ @ @ @ @ @ @ futile in the submarine force , as to do so you have to identify your rank and so open yourself up to further retribution .
In other words , my son is already experiencing a system in which 43 percent of the men and women on active duty are people of color , and yet , in practice , one that has regularly culled its officer class down to white men , as Helene Cooper ’ s recent striking investigative piece in The New York Times made all too clear .
It ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ my son and other children like him tend to assume that the bad things that happen in this country do so through violence , armed and otherwise .
Like more or less everyone in the United States now , he knows that George Floyd died on a street corner in Minneapolis because a police officer knelt on his neck .
In my son ’ s short life , he ’ s also experienced a military world in which old missiles are painted bright colors and repurposed as street lamps and benches at military @ @ @ @ @ @ @ whiskey bottles in our own dining room shaped like ballistic missile submarines .
I remember him , at 3 , standing beside me as I anxiously watched the nightly news during one of his father ’ s sea deployments to an unknown location , as Donald Trump threatened to release “ fire and fury like the world has never seen ” on the Korean peninsula .
I ’ ve found him looking over my shoulder as I sifted through photographs of burnt and bloody Iraqi and Afghan children in my work for the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ snuck G.I .
Joe figurines into some of the toy trucks they ’ ve given him as gifts—in their quest to one day make him “ like his daddy.
” And let ’ s not forget the active-shooter drills that were a regular part of preschool until Covid-19 struck , making the threat of weaponry an aspect of any child ’ s life away from home ( and dodging them a kind of game ) .
Even at his young age , my son has been interested indeed in finding out what violence @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and to its perpetrators as well .
He zoned out during Sesame Street ’ s town-hall-style program that attempted to explain American racism by having Big Bird teased for his size and color ( a show that , by the way , didn ’ t explain slavery ) .
Yet he was riveted when Nickelodeon stopped its programming for eight minutes and 46 seconds .
Most white parents assume that their children need to be sheltered from truths central to how our country is run and how it feels to so many .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ ve lived in for so long , however , as ( to a far greater degree ) in civilian communities of color , reckoning every day with what violations of your body will feel like is part of life itself .
The threat of armed violence shapes the major life decisions of so many people of color today .
I recently interviewed retired Marine enlistee Affraz Mohammed .
He has written eloquently of his path as a Trinidadian-Muslim immigrant of Indian descent , who grew up in Newark , N.J. , in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ US Marines .
There , before 9/11 , he became well enough respected to be assigned as an escort to high-ranking diplomats at President George W. Bush ’ s 2001 inauguration , but the road to that moment ( and thereafter ) would be hell indeed .
Affraz Mohammed decided to join the military on the assumption that he would die young anyway if he stayed where he lived .
“ In the community I grew up in , ” as he put it , “ there wasn ’ t much opportunity .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ I died in my neighborhood , the government wasn ’ t going to pay for my funeral.
” After all , his neighbor , the cousin of his best friend , shot his two cousins in an act of violence Mohammed still doesn ’ t understand .
“ There were guns lying on the ground there because drug dealers stashed them in abandoned buildings .
It was like stepping on candy , because that was your self-protection.
” To him , joining the military seemed to offer more hope of a future than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the Marines there would be “ rules of engagement ” when it came to using a rifle .
His journey through boot camp , however , would prove anything but easy .
Drill instructors placed sandbags around his bunk ( “ to make me feel more at home ” ) , called him a “ towel head , ” and punched him .
“ My meanest boot camp drill sergeant told me that one day I would understand why I was treated this way.
” After 9/11 , he would indeed find @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a sting operation for purchasing a then-illegal automatic rifle from another Marine .
He had only wanted a pistol , but the seller arrived with what he claimed was a legal semiautomatic rifle , and offered him a good price for it .
As soon as the deal was completed , he was , as he wrote in a piece for The New York Times , “ swarmed and arrested by government agents from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the Bureau of Alcohol , Tobacco , Firearms and Explosives.
” Held in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he was not informed of the charges against him ( which would fall apart at his future trial , the jury concluding that he was lied to and entrapped ) .
He was , he says , raped there before being sent back to pretrial detention at Marine Corps Base Quantico .
During that time , fellow Marines watching over him treated him as a “ terrorist , ” threatened his life , forced him to do menial tasks like picking up pubic hairs in the public bathroom using tweezers , and continued @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Despite such treatment , Mohammed told me , “ the military was hard , but growing up in the United States was harder .
Even fellow Muslims at my local mosque treated me like an outsider because I was not Arab .
Now , the FBI officials watching me want to know all about my connections with local mosques where I was never really accepted anyway.
” Calls and in-person check-ins from the FBI have continued both for him and the Veterans Administration therapist treating him for the post-traumatic stress disorder he got @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ I Learned to Keep Going Even Though It ’ s Tough.
” Other service members of color regularly suffer , even if not as severely as Mohammed did .
Research by the Costs of War Project has , for instance , documented the way people of Arab and South Asian descent were profiled en masse and mistreated after the 9/11 attacks .
Of one thing there can be no question : The US military , like the rest of American society , is infused with racism and yet service members of color @ @ @ @ @ @ @ steel themselves against the more unpredictable racist horrors of American life .
In one military community where my family and I once lived , for example , I met a Mexican-American veteran who had served in a wartime Air Force unit in Vietnam .
I still remember him telling me that he felt more affinity for the people he was shooting at than for members of his own command , most of whom were white .
He spoke in anguished terms of then-candidate Trump ’ s warning that there would be “ taco @ @ @ @ @ @ @ country didn ’ t severely restrict immigration .
His parents , he told me , owned a Mexican restaurant and that was how the family survived .
Through his military service , he added , “ I learned I mattered even if it wasn ’ t recognized outside .
I learned to keep going even though it ’ s tough.
” By all accounts , it is tough .
And the boot camp of life for people of color begins early in this country .
Once , when I mentioned to a black @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seem to notice differences in race at their preschool , she responded , “ Well , I bet that the black kids notice differences.
” Not long after , while dropping my kids off one day , I noticed an African American staff member yelling at two black girls struggling over a doll .
“ Sit down , right now !
” she insisted .
Her tone was harsher than commands I ’ ve seen given in the military .
Unnoticed , I ’ ve watched the same woman discipline my white child @ @ @ @ @ @ @ how great the toy was that he and the other child were fighting over before counseling them both on how to take turns .
In that way , I feel I saw a tiny example in the lives of those preschool children of the boot camp of black life in America .
In an NPR interview , New Jersey Senator Cory Booker described an all-American “ tradition ” of elderly black men teaching their kids “ how to protect their black bodies from racism manifested in the most evil of ways , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ such a boot camp : keeping such kids safe from white peers , coaches , the police , future bosses , or anyone likely to find them “ out of place ” and capable of hurting them in response .
As a military spouse and therapist , it ’ s clear to me that , these days , whether people of color or not , active-duty servicemen and -women , as well as veterans , generally face a host of difficulties in this country .
They range from problems accessing much needed responsive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a civilian population that understands little about their experiences , to chronic illnesses and injuries they suffer , to repeated deployments in America ’ s forever wars .
Now , add to all that the current showdown between highly militarized police and Black Lives Matter protesters , as well as the president ’ s deployment of the National Guard and his threats to deploy federal troops to quell protests in Washington , D.C. ( and elsewhere ) .
As one Washington therapist who works with military service members and their families told me @ @ @ @ @ @ @ combat are triggered by the sight of police in military-style equipment facing down crowds of civilians and , in response , they socially isolate themselves more .
For some veterans , when the home front starts to look like a war zone and fears rise that the Trump administration will use force against peaceful citizens , it feels like a new red line has been crossed .
As Affraz Mohammed told me , “ When the veterans of these wars come home , they won ’ t understand what ’ s going on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hostile environment at home .
They want to come home .
They turn the light switch off when they go home .
What ’ s going to happen when they ’ ve got to turn it on again ?
” As illustrated by an NPR interview with that rarest of figures , black retired Maj. Gen. Dana Pittard , Mohammed is not the only person of color who worries that the very civil liberties he ’ s fought to protect are at risk in the United States as our endless wars in distant @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ I was very concerned with even the threat of using active duty military to quell the protests.
” ) After all , those heavily white police forces , now facing off against Black Lives Matter demonstrators in cities and towns across the country , are equipped at this point with about $ 1.8 billion dollars worth of Pentagon-supplied military gear , including mine-resistant vehicles and grenade launchers .
( Since that Pentagon program began in 1997 , $ 7.4 billion worth of such stuff has been handed out . )
A 2017 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had received such military gear had more civilian deaths than those that hadn ’ t .
In the present context , my own family members , unlike General Pittard and some of the parents of my child clients , aren ’ t afraid for our lives or those of our children , not here in the United States .
That ’ s what racism means at the deepest level in a still white-dominated military in a still white-dominated country .
Yet as the United States comes ever more to resemble a war zone @ @ @ @ @ @ @ country run by a president with autocratic inclinations , amid a surge of protest over racism , the home front could indeed become a war front .
Then , among military families at least , the experiences of so many people of color and their children could come to seem more familiar .
If those in uniform continue to be the aggressors against black , brown , and white protesters , including children , where will any of us find a safe haven ?

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.
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Recently, in this Black Lives Matter protest moment, my 5-year-old son looked at me and asked, “Mommy, where did all the brown people go? Did the police here shoot them?”
We’d just moved to the outskirts of a more affluent rural town from a city where my son and 3-and-a-half-year-old daughter mixed daily with black, Latino, and Asian American kids and were among a minority of whites at their preschool. Now, it was whites to the horizon: the white UPS guy, the white neighbors nearly a mile away on either side of us, the white motorcycle gangs zooming down the road in front of our house, sometimes sporting Confederate flags on their seat backs.
As I fumbled to explain racism, the general mistreatment of people of color, income inequality, and redlining in the simplest terms I could imagine, my son tried to clarify things: “So white people steal? Is that what they use the guns for?”
In his young life he’s already absorbed way too much talk of guns, bombs, weapons, and war thanks to the news he catches in passing, as well as discussions of my husband’s work on nuclear and ballistic-missile submarines and now as a Pentagon official, not to speak of my own work as a therapist in military communities, a human rights activist, and the cofounder of the Costs of War Project. I think, by now, he assumes that things in this country happen mainly thanks to the brute force of white guys with guns.
At his young age, he already struggles regularly with thoughts about how it feels to be treated badly because of the way you look. Late the other night, when he should have been asleep, he called me in and asked, “Mommy, what does it feel like when someone kneels on your neck?” And when, while riding in our car with the radio news on, he heard about the pepper spraying of protesters in Lafayette Square near the White House, he asked, “Was that coronavirus they were spraying? Does that make you not breathe, too? Is the world bad?”
Later, he wondered aloud: “Does Daddy have a gun? Is he scared?”
I guess it’s logical enough for the child of a man who has served on three subs and an aircraft carrier during his 17-year naval career to assume that the people with power and the mandate to kill are white men. Certainly, whenever we’ve attended a Navy gathering, we invariably face a sea of white officers and their white, J.Crew-clad wives. Current Issue View our current issue
And—not to cast aspersions—the four of us look as if we belong on the cover of a muesli box with our pale skin, fair hair, and long, well-nourished limbs. The rare people of color we’ve come to know among the officer class in the Navy have had their own stories to tell about the commonplace nature of the racial slurs like “raghead” they’ve heard in the service and of being threatened with racially motivated violence by peers and higher-ups alike, sometimes under the guise of “training” exercises. 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
To report such threatened or actual violence is usually futile in the submarine force, as to do so you have to identify your rank and so open yourself up to further retribution. In other words, my son is already experiencing a system in which 43 percent of the men and women on active duty are people of color, and yet, in practice, one that has regularly culled its officer class down to white men, as Helene Cooper’s recent striking investigative piece in The New York Times made all too clear.
It’s hardly surprising, then, that my son and other children like him tend to assume that the bad things that happen in this country do so through violence, armed and otherwise. Like more or less everyone in the United States now, he knows that George Floyd died on a street corner in Minneapolis because a police officer knelt on his neck. In my son’s short life, he’s also experienced a military world in which old missiles are painted bright colors and repurposed as street lamps and benches at military bases, not to speak of seeing whiskey bottles in our own dining room shaped like ballistic missile submarines.
I remember him, at 3, standing beside me as I anxiously watched the nightly news during one of his father’s sea deployments to an unknown location, as Donald Trump threatened to release “fire and fury like the world has never seen” on the Korean peninsula. I’ve found him looking over my shoulder as I sifted through photographs of burnt and bloody Iraqi and Afghan children in my work for the Costs of War Project. Relatives have snuck G.I. Joe figurines into some of the toy trucks they’ve given him as gifts—in their quest to one day make him “like his daddy.” And let’s not forget the active-shooter drills that were a regular part of preschool until Covid-19 struck, making the threat of weaponry an aspect of any child’s life away from home (and dodging them a kind of game).
Even at his young age, my son has been interested indeed in finding out what violence feels like to those who experience it and to its perpetrators as well. He zoned out during Sesame Street’s town-hall-style program that attempted to explain American racism by having Big Bird teased for his size and color (a show that, by the way, didn’t explain slavery). Yet he was riveted when Nickelodeon stopped its programming for eight minutes and 46 seconds.
Most white parents assume that their children need to be sheltered from truths central to how our country is run and how it feels to so many. In the world of military families I’ve lived in for so long, however, as (to a far greater degree) in civilian communities of color, reckoning every day with what violations of your body will feel like is part of life itself.
One Veteran’s Story
The threat of armed violence shapes the major life decisions of so many people of color today. I recently interviewed retired Marine enlistee Affraz Mohammed. He has written eloquently of his path as a Trinidadian-Muslim immigrant of Indian descent, who grew up in Newark, N.J., in the 1980s and 1990s, into the US Marines. There, before 9/11, he became well enough respected to be assigned as an escort to high-ranking diplomats at President George W. Bush’s 2001 inauguration, but the road to that moment (and thereafter) would be hell indeed.
Affraz Mohammed decided to join the military on the assumption that he would die young anyway if he stayed where he lived. “In the community I grew up in,” as he put it, “there wasn’t much opportunity. We had a crack epidemic. If I died in my neighborhood, the government wasn’t going to pay for my funeral.”
After all, his neighbor, the cousin of his best friend, shot his two cousins in an act of violence Mohammed still doesn’t understand. “There were guns lying on the ground there because drug dealers stashed them in abandoned buildings. It was like stepping on candy, because that was your self-protection.” To him, joining the military seemed to offer more hope of a future than staying in his neighborhood. At least in the Marines there would be “rules of engagement” when it came to using a rifle.
His journey through boot camp, however, would prove anything but easy. Drill instructors placed sandbags around his bunk (“to make me feel more at home”), called him a “towel head,” and punched him. “My meanest boot camp drill sergeant told me that one day I would understand why I was treated this way.”
After 9/11, he would indeed find out. He would be arrested in a sting operation for purchasing a then-illegal automatic rifle from another Marine. He had only wanted a pistol, but the seller arrived with what he claimed was a legal semiautomatic rifle, and offered him a good price for it. As soon as the deal was completed, he was, as he wrote in a piece for The New York Times, “swarmed and arrested by government agents from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.”
Held in a prison in Alexandria, Va., he was not informed of the charges against him (which would fall apart at his future trial, the jury concluding that he was lied to and entrapped). He was, he says, raped there before being sent back to pretrial detention at Marine Corps Base Quantico. During that time, fellow Marines watching over him treated him as a “terrorist,” threatened his life, forced him to do menial tasks like picking up pubic hairs in the public bathroom using tweezers, and continued to sling racial slurs at him.
Despite such treatment, Mohammed told me, “the military was hard, but growing up in the United States was harder. Even fellow Muslims at my local mosque treated me like an outsider because I was not Arab. Now, the FBI officials watching me want to know all about my connections with local mosques where I was never really accepted anyway.” Calls and in-person check-ins from the FBI have continued both for him and the Veterans Administration therapist treating him for the post-traumatic stress disorder he got from his time in the military.
“I Learned to Keep Going Even Though It’s Tough.”
Other service members of color regularly suffer, even if not as severely as Mohammed did. Research by the Costs of War Project has, for instance, documented the way people of Arab and South Asian descent were profiled en masse and mistreated after the 9/11 attacks.
Of one thing there can be no question: The US military, like the rest of American society, is infused with racism and yet service members of color like Mohammed often enough join anyway to steel themselves against the more unpredictable racist horrors of American life. In one military community where my family and I once lived, for example, I met a Mexican-American veteran who had served in a wartime Air Force unit in Vietnam. I still remember him telling me that he felt more affinity for the people he was shooting at than for members of his own command, most of whom were white. He spoke in anguished terms of then-candidate Trump’s warning that there would be “taco trucks on every corner” if this country didn’t severely restrict immigration. His parents, he told me, owned a Mexican restaurant and that was how the family survived. Through his military service, he added, “I learned I mattered even if it wasn’t recognized outside. I learned to keep going even though it’s tough.”
By all accounts, it is tough. And the boot camp of life for people of color begins early in this country. Once, when I mentioned to a black friend that my kids didn’t seem to notice differences in race at their preschool, she responded, “Well, I bet that the black kids notice differences.”
Not long after, while dropping my kids off one day, I noticed an African American staff member yelling at two black girls struggling over a doll. “Sit down, right now!” she insisted. Her tone was harsher than commands I’ve seen given in the military. Unnoticed, I’ve watched the same woman discipline my white child in a similar dispute by commenting on how great the toy was that he and the other child were fighting over before counseling them both on how to take turns. In that way, I feel I saw a tiny example in the lives of those preschool children of the boot camp of black life in America.
In an NPR interview, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker described an all-American “tradition” of elderly black men teaching their kids “how to protect their black bodies from racism manifested in the most evil of ways, which is murder.”
The end goal of such a boot camp: keeping such kids safe from white peers, coaches, the police, future bosses, or anyone likely to find them “out of place” and capable of hurting them in response.
Home Front or War Zone?
As a military spouse and therapist, it’s clear to me that, these days, whether people of color or not, active-duty servicemen and -women, as well as veterans, generally face a host of difficulties in this country. They range from problems accessing much needed responsive health care services to social isolation from a civilian population that understands little about their experiences, to chronic illnesses and injuries they suffer, to repeated deployments in America’s forever wars.
Now, add to all that the current showdown between highly militarized police and Black Lives Matter protesters, as well as the president’s deployment of the National Guard and his threats to deploy federal troops to quell protests in Washington, D.C. (and elsewhere). As one Washington therapist who works with military service members and their families told me, many veterans find that memories of combat are triggered by the sight of police in military-style equipment facing down crowds of civilians and, in response, they socially isolate themselves more.
For some veterans, when the home front starts to look like a war zone and fears rise that the Trump administration will use force against peaceful citizens, it feels like a new red line has been crossed. As Affraz Mohammed told me, “When the veterans of these wars come home, they won’t understand what’s going on. They are not used to a hostile environment at home. They want to come home. They turn the light switch off when they go home. What’s going to happen when they’ve got to turn it on again?”
As illustrated by an NPR interview with that rarest of figures, black retired Maj. Gen. Dana Pittard, Mohammed is not the only person of color who worries that the very civil liberties he’s fought to protect are at risk in the United States as our endless wars in distant lands continue to come home. (“I was very concerned with even the threat of using active duty military to quell the protests.”) After all, those heavily white police forces, now facing off against Black Lives Matter demonstrators in cities and towns across the country, are equipped at this point with about $1.8 billion dollars worth of Pentagon-supplied military gear, including mine-resistant vehicles and grenade launchers. (Since that Pentagon program began in 1997, $7.4 billion worth of such stuff has been handed out.) A 2017 study found that cities where the police had received such military gear had more civilian deaths than those that hadn’t.
In the present context, my own family members, unlike General Pittard and some of the parents of my child clients, aren’t afraid for our lives or those of our children, not here in the United States. That’s what racism means at the deepest level in a still white-dominated military in a still white-dominated country. Yet as the United States comes ever more to resemble a war zone in a pandemic moment, in a country run by a president with autocratic inclinations, amid a surge of protest over racism, the home front could indeed become a war front. Then, among military families at least, the experiences of so many people of color and their children could come to seem more familiar. If those in uniform continue to be the aggressors against black, brown, and white protesters, including children, where will any of us find a safe haven?


thenation--2020-06-23--Officer, Why the Riot Gear?

Officer, Why the Riot Gear?

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