The blazing mane around 1998.
I had an experience recently with a Boomer feminist during a Zoom meeting. After I fiddled with the audio and got the camera online, I came into view.
'There you are!' she said. '"You were hiding behind your hair. "
Wait. Did she just....? Wasn't she a feminist when I was a kid? Did she not get the memo that things have changed and such comments are the illest and insensitive form of communication referred to as micro-aggressions?
'I'm not hiding.' I said. ' My hair is going to get bigger.'
She went on to explain she had something like mine, which she didn't.
' I may not look like it now,' she said. "But, when I was younger my hair was very curly. I could even put a pencil in it! '
She was referring to a racist practice in Apartheid South Africa to determine a person's Afro-textured hair. The pencil test was also done to American mixed race children between the 19th and mid-20th centuries. There were other racist and colorist practices - the brown paper bag test and Eugenics theory among them.
' Yeah.... ' I said. ' I see similarities in the hair of the Ashkenazi people. I am as creation made me. Anyway, let's get started! '
I kept my cool and moved on, internalizing the same shit I've been subjected to since childhood. I'll save my bitterness of the oppressed for therapy.
The most amusing part of that Zoom was my supervisor, the GM. A millennial intellectual in his 30s, he went to an Ivy League school and was a serious nerd for the arts. He is exceedingly polite and professional, and has a keen awareness of the injustices within American society.' Will you shut the fuck up about her hair! ' was all over his face.
Looking at him on the monitor he was going to stroke out, but he was unable to intercede. She was hired by the board, was a reflection of it. In American arts and letters, or any non profit arts institution, the board functions like the Wizard of Oz. They are world and culture creators to their class.
“When you stand up in front of people, imagine them in their underwear.”
I'll stop a phD in their tracks with the hold up. All I have to do is interject an alternate reality when they start with the Gloria Steinem-Mary Tyler Moore-Wonder Woman-Charlie's Angel who fucked around-with-revolutionary-poets-and-didn't-marry-Michael Brady-but could-have story.
Power dynamics. We all have to navigate them in our working and social lives. I was never good at that or recognizing the nuances of it. I'm so egalitarian I could offend the elite and not even know it. I believe in humanity, not capitalism or social hierarchies even though I'm aware both exist.
There is always a person somewhere who can flex their position in relation to another. America has always been less a democracy and more like a caste system - people separated by race, class, and culture. We all default to our biases - in destructive and assumptive ways. The Boomer feminist is from Contra Costa, a notoriously un-California straight and suburban county I call Bob Dole Country. It is clean, orderly, predominately white, Libertarian and Republican.
In contentious interactions, I learned a cool trick when I was a kid, watching Brady Bunch reruns.
I flipped that to imagining the adversary in middle school. That's a good baseline because middle school was hell for everyone across generations. I went back in time to the Boomer in 6th grade, sometime in the early to mid 1960s. I know that was a rough ride for her. For women of her generation attractiveness, not intelligence, was their social currency and she didn't have it. She had to find another pathway to respectability and security which came through her intelligence and an MBA. She had to prove herself because beauty had forsaken her and creation gave her a not inherently likeable disposition. Her first reaction is to bark, not engage.
I heard that little girl in her tone when I had edited her convoluted title that read more efficiently in three words instead of six.
" I write my title like that all the time!'
Whoa. My bad, Ms. Parker.
Another co-worker, the same generation, had been with the arts org for 10 years. The Finn was a 6 ft. tall Viking doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley. After years working in research she started from scratch and went into the arts sector. As a person, she had an awesome Scandinavian openness and sense of humor, whereas the American Boomer was completely humor-less. I enjoyed reading the Finn's emails; a stream of consciousness context to all things and people.
Her transliteration of American idioms would crack me up: ' He fell asleep on it.' or ' I'm off the line with this.' She was a like boisterous, living Brienne of Tarth with a fierce intellect. She shared fascinating articles with me about philosophy and cryosphere research of the Arctic glaciers. The Finn seemed disappointed when I talked shit about Monterey Market, Berkeley's most insufferable vegan mob blue meanie scene. Snobitronic for the beets crew.
The Finn respected my intelligence, whereas the Boomer was dishing The Secret Life of Bees energy.
In her mind, The Finn now reported to the Boomer. I was a bit frustrated one morning, after another, terse email that read like a mean girl - formatted in wonky AOL which was like reading Tetris. Had no one mentioned this to her?
She's still emotionally attached to doing things manually and talking to people on the phone, both processes that are being phased out of human interaction in the modern age. Theoretically, I suppose one could try.
' Women had to work very hard back then.' The Finn said, referring to the 1960s and 70s. ' Sometimes even acting like the men.'
' Mmm hmm. ' I said. ' Imagine being a black woman during that time.'
Lady, please. They all came up with Jazzercise and look at how well that stood the test of time.
They came up with Ms. in defiance against marriage, which the American woman had been defined by for generations. Ms. was a kind of magical autonomy. It was so radical, the married surname became two without a hyphen. It reads like a middle name and informs society that she is in fact married, but also signals autonomy. My colleagues at elections, mostly Boomer women, were bodacious and sarcastic about their time. They conceded their flops and admitted their victories such as Our Bodies Ourselves, which I myself was raised on. They explained to me that women couldn't have credit in their own name until the 1970s. What?!
In conversation with a young Gen Z colleague from the UK, I shared the Boomer's micro-aggression about my hair. The young taught me the word for commentary and tone I've experienced my entire life.
Gen Z gasped. "Oh my god! Why did she say that?"
Gen Z are serious with the reasoning. They want to know why a person is fucked up. To them, boomers are the first wave elderly who failed because their feminism was the straight middle class in revolt. There are articles and memes all over the interwebs that read like a reckoning with the past:
Feminism Failed.
Gen Z brought me a handmade birthday card with a photo of Tina, You're Simply the Best written inside. I had cried when Tina passed, a soul and rock goddess from my childhood into adulthood. I was touched by the card - it had meaning beyond Gen Z's kindness. Her generation are not afraid and demand change. Boomers can't seem to bare being white women; aligned to a power structure they believed they were in opposition to when their movement indirectly reinforced it the same shit. Someone once told me that American feminism, as it is, best served the status quo. I thought about that and what CA non-profit leadership looks like in 2023.
Oh snap.
The birthday card took the sting and hurt out of The Secret Life of Bees. That's what I call that shit. The other nickname is The Help.
There seems to be an underlying context of who we are in relation to one another through history - what one has and what one doesn't. Her comments are an attempt at control, an assumption that I will acquiesce in the face of positional power. It's ironic to me that I was hired for the same reason Boomer was flexing. Diversity be all like a fickle mistress.
In the coming months I'm going full Lion King. Queen? Non-binary Lioness? Something naturally black like that, which is inofitself a revolutionary act.
In 2021 CA passed the Crown Act, which at the time I was cynical about. We only need such laws enacted because of how pervasive racism and discrimination are in this country. Now I understand the need and see the value in it.
In the 1980s, when I was in art school in New York, I had a gig working for an Italian playboy-pimp and his stripper girlfriend. Through his booze and cocaine saturated conversation, he told me something once that I have remembered for 30 years; profound as it was in its simplicity. It could be found in the abstract, in nature, in the smallest thing in existence, from death, or in the immortality of art.
Beauty is the best revenge.
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