Buffering
Yi-Ling:
Lately, I’ve had to remind myself that I am a body. We are all bodies. Not just a finger on a touchscreen, but a whole messy jumble of limbs, blood, cells and organs. I’ve had to remind myself — as we withdraw further into our virtual worlds, scrolling and swiping — that all these words I consume I will end up carrying in my body. Lately, we seem to have forgotten that language is physical. Words hurt. Words, on the most visceral and cellular level, are capable of violence.
Taking stock of all the language I consume every day, I can’t help but wonder what it is doing to us — to our minds, our bodies, our communities. Do you feel it? I feel wrecked at the end of each day, sitting in front of my chair, doing nothing. What kind of violence do we absorb every day, slowly and insidiously, with every headline, story and tweet? When the President composes a tweet, with a flick of his wrist, borrowing directly from the violent rhetoric of bigotry and brutality of the 60s, how does it glorify that violence? When we wake up in the morning to a news editorial, calling for the government to: “Send in the Troops,” how does that headline, four syllables laid out in a headline without context or explanation, legitimize that violence?
It was the late and brilliant Toni Morrison — specifically through her novel The Bluest Eye — who first spelled out to me this connection between language and violence. She showed me that when a young, Black girl consumes a certain kind of language — the norms that dictate what is beautiful and ideal (a white, blue-eyed doll) and what is ugly and unworthy (her own, black skin) — she is subject to a certain kind of violence. That when an entire community uses this language, it becomes complicit in that violence. That when an entire society absorbs this language, it perpetuates this violence, in the brutal ways that we continue to see everyday, to this day, to this second.
This is not always obvious. Think of the everyday idioms, sayings and phrases that have quietly and insidiously embedded in the ways we express ourselves. In a podcast interview between the writer Ocean Vuong with Krista Tippett (shout out to Kaitlin for the recommendation, we both listened to it several times, at this point) Vuong discusses the violence of the American lexicon, and how young men talk to each other. “You slayed it, you bagged her, you killed it, you knocked it out off the park, drop-dead gorgeous,” he rattles through our common sayings.“We’re still so primitive in the way we use language. What is it about a culture that values itself through the lexicon of death?”
The last thing that I would ever suggest is that we need to scrub our mouths and web clean of this language; that is a dangerous and slippery slope. I live, after all, in China, where the violence of language is most evident not in its expression, but in its silencing. So what then, is the answer? How does a newsroom expose its readership to ideas that are violent without perpetuating that cycle of violence? How do we create not a firewall, but a buffer: something that protects us from violence without shielding us from the truth? As Morrison has inspired us to do, how do we take apart our language and reassemble something that is more just, more kind and more powerful?
Sophie:
Over only the last months, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Sean Monterrosa, Justin Howell, Jamel Floyd, David McAtee, and Rayshard Brooks were murdered by law enforcement officers. Over the last decades, American police have killed thousands of others, disproportionately Black and brown. This needs to end, and so does policing in America.
I have not been there over the past few years in the fight for the end of state-sponsored murder or for the abolition of police. This has to do both with buffers I erected—journalistic distance, self-involvement, silence—and in part because of structural buffers that have always been there, especially my wealth and my whiteness. I’m committing to do the work of anti-racism now, to learn and listen, but also to show up and support.
YL:
Reading: The Overstory by Richard Powers, a brilliant, urgent, sprawling novel about trees (the best book I’ve read in a long, long time) My Beautiful Struggle, by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Coates’ lesser-known memoir that he wrote before Between the World and Me, a book that inspired me to write my first work of longform nonfiction,) and On Fire, by Naomi Klein (which I feel like the entire world should’ve all read ten years ago, but is never too late.) This On Being podcast once again between the wise Krista Tippett & Resma Menakem, a therapist and trauma specialist (on how a history of real battlefield against racism exists not only in our policies and laws - but in our very bodies themselves.)
Writing: The piece I worked on all of last fall finally published in Harper’s Magazine on the Hong Kong protests — weaving together two months of on-ground reportage with two decades of navigating an increasingly fractured identity. I also wrote an essay about the June Fourth Vigil for The Baffler, contributed to this report on the future of artificial intelligence education in the Chinese classroom for the UK innovation fund Nesta and this piece for BBC Future on the effects of Covid-19 on relationships, mental health and gender inequality. (Some audio things: I spoke about developments in Hong Kong post-Covid on Harper’s podcast here and with the Divided Families podcast here, and recorded a podcast with Asia Art Tours on Blued and LGBTQ politics in China.)
SH:
Reading: I’ve been reading, or rather listening to, Alex Vitale’s The End of Policing, and Parallel Lives, a wonderful gift from a friend that examines six marriages and changed the way I think about them . I also was bowled over by this piece by Breonna Taylor’s mother, and this piece on Minneapolis. I’ve been reading and talking about this report by MPD150 with family and friends, on 150 years of the Minneapolis Departmnt and reimagining society without police. This piece, on the problems with anti-racist reading lists, was one of the best pieces of writing and literary criticism I can remember.
Writing: I wrote about the heartbreak of canceled museum showsin the time of coronavirus, and Ai Weiwei’s project to sell art-as-masks for COVID-related relief efforts, for The New York Times. For Tortoise, I wrote about museum efforts to go digital, and for the May issue of Art in America, I wrote about the dizziness of Google Street View tours on museums. For the Guardian, I wrote about TikTok, and for High Country News, I reviewed a good book about fracking and violenceon a reservation in North Dakota.