Letter from the Editor
In May of last year (which feels like a decade ago), Lana del Rey courted controversy with an Instagram post about what she perceived as an unfair critical response to her work. In the now-infamous post, she posed a “question for the culture:”
Now that Doja Cat, Ariana, Camila, Cardi B, Kehlani and Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé have had number ones with songs about being sexy, wearing no clothes, fucking, cheating etc.—can I please go back to singing about being embodied, feeling beautiful by being in love even if the relationship is not perfect, or dancing for money—or whatever I want—without being crucified or saying that I’m glamorizing abuse??????
Del Rey was swiftly, rightly criticized for deprecating the achievements of women of color (four of the artists she names were then in the number one and two spots on the Billboard 100) in order to play the victim. Who did she think was stopping her from writing the songs she wants to write? How could the superstar possibly see herself as “crucified?” Why did she feel the need to position herself as a martyr in relation to these other artists, who have certainly faced steeper challenges? I’ve loved Lana’s music for years, so I found the post not just ridiculous but heartbreakingly stupid.
“There has to be a place in feminism for women who look and act like me,” del Rey wrote, referring to her “sometimes submissive or passive roles” in relationships, “the kind of woman who says no but men hear yes.”
There has to be a place in feminism...isn’t there?!
In my view, however, there are interesting questions buried in del Rey’s statement. Questions I think about often, that I recently wrote about in my memoir—about femininity, codependency, romance, violence, domination and submission, the insidious ways patriarchy pits women against one another. After I read her post, I wanted to write an essay about some of these questions, but I was too turned off by del Rey’s flagrant lack of self-awareness to follow through.
But the post lingered. It really irked me. Was it just white fragility that deluded del Rey, a multimillionaire and six-time Grammy nominee? Was it living in the non-reality of mega-celebrity? Is she just not that smart? How can so many white people in this country see themselves as victims? In follow-up posts, del Rey tried to clarify her position, such as it was, but like so many people called out for shitty behavior, she got defensive and dug her heels in instead.
In general, May of 2020—a time when a massive social movement to protest racist state violence and white supremacy was surging—would have been a good time for white women to shut up and listen. Instead, many jockeyed for space and airtime on social media, hashtagging their allegiance to Black Lives Matter, and posting photos of the anti-racist literature they bought with such fervor that many titles were backordered for weeks. (As Katherine Morgan wrote in a recent Lithub piece, some of these ostensibly well-meaning white people had the audacity to complain about long waits for backordered books, make racist comments about Black businesses, or never come pick up the books they ordered at all.) Some white women were busy trying to advertise to the world that they were doing anti-racism perfectly; others were weaponizing their “innocence” by siccing the cops on birdwatchers and barbecuers.
Like everyone else over this last year, I have tried to think about how to be: how to survive; where, when, and how to march and donate goods and funds; how to be involved; how to manage my own grief and anger; how to practice allyship without merely performing; how to talk to my children about race, policing, structural inequality, whiteness; how to hold white people to account. I wanted to acknowledge the traumatic experience the people of color in my life were having, but I did not want to exhaust friends or ask them to do more work. I didn’t want to be talking too much but I didn’t want to be silent and thus complicit.
All of this was on my mind when I was invited to guest edit an issue of Triangle House Review. The editors and I discussed a roundtable where a diverse group of women and nonbinary writers would talk openly about how they had experienced race and racism this year. I asked a journalist friend to moderate it. But every time I sat down to write an invitation to the roundtable, my writing became very academic, evacuated of my voice, of humor or humanity. I was retreating into a kind of formal, toothless language. I was hiding, being fragile myself, and it became clear that a roundtable ran the risk of becoming an echo chamber of white voices or yet another space where people of color are expected to do the heavy lifting of explaining racism. And yet the whole point of the idea had been to interrogate these forms of white vanity and fragility, to be a forum for more honest, transparent talk about the lived complexities of these issues. So we decided to nix the roundtable idea.
Instead, we solicited off-the-cuff, unedited written reflections on race and racism in the insane garbage year of 2020 and into the present. We invited reflections on fragility, vanity, shame, the imposition on women of color to educate white women, the ineffectuality of talking about whiteness without direct action on behalf of people of color, the election, the attack on the Capitol, Covid, something annoying that happened, something you wish would happen, hope, care, joy, solidarity. Even Lana.
This special feature is a place for writers to just say a thing or get something off their chest. We ended up with a kind of meta-conversation on the dilemma of talking about the dilemma of race today. We hope maybe we got at something more honest this way.
