#448: Running From Blackness

Plus: The death of student writing and the backlash against LGBTQ teachers

Hi there and happy summer, loyal readers. I’m happy you’re here. ☀️

This week’s search for a great lead article took a circuitous route via The Audacity, Roxane Gay’s newsletter. Because many of you are subscribers, you may have seen last week’s emerging writer piece, “Black Negation,” by Allen M. Price. Reading that article led me on an online reading binge of Mr. Price’s essays. He writes clearly and directly about race, and his prose is unvarnished and unapologetic. I think that you’ll find reading “Running from Blackness,” valuable and thought provoking.

Because sometimes articles are best read in conversation, I’ve paired this week’s lead article with a best-of-AC selection — “Twelve Minutes and a Life,” by Mitchell S. Jackson. Published in June 2020, Mr. Jackson’s profile of Ahmaud Arbery is stunning. My hope is that you’ll read it (if you haven’t already).

Not interested in heavy (and important) articles about race and identity? Here are a couple more pieces to check out. They’re about:

• the death of student writing in the age of artificial intelligence

• the battle against the anti-LGBTQ backlash in California in the 1970s

⭐️ Join us for this month’s discussion of “The Abstract Rage To Protect,” by Amanda E. Machado. It’s a deep, thought-provoking article about about masculinity, the need for men to protect women, the violence that follows, and what we can do about it. ICYMI, here’s last week’s issue with more info.

We’re meeting on Zoom on Sunday, June 30, from 2:00 to 3:30 pm PT to discuss the article. If you’re interested, I urge you to take the leap.

1️⃣ Running From Blackness

Allen M. Price grew up in an all-white neighborhood in Warwick, Rhode Island, because his mother did not want him to be hurt, kidnapped, or killed. He began running in the sixth grade because he wanted to fit in with his white friends. Then he kept running, got good, and never looked back.

For much of his youth and adulthood, Mr. Price writes, “running took my mind off of knowing and understanding my Blackness or rather my lack of wanting to.” But the murder of Ahmaud Arbery caused him to reflect on how his childhood conditioned him to struggle with racial embarrassment. Now in his 40s, his relationship with running — and its influence on his identity — has shifted. Mr. Price writes:

When I ran, the layers of my identity that I had gathered in my life, that white America had put on me, the labels, names, cruel names, all of it fell away, leaving me with the raw soul of my being. By running harder, faster, deeper, further away from those almost irreparable scars on my developing young mind that burdened me with unrelenting stress, anger, and melancholy drove me to lose all sense of my lost identity and low self-esteem. All the hurt, frustration, and fatigue disappeared, and what appeared was a spiritual enlightenment, a meditation through movement, a connection beyond this physical world, beyond this earthly realm. By tiring, wearing down my body, my ego, running allowed my consciousness to appear and feel a sense of unity with the universe.

By Allen M. Price • The Masters Review • 15 min • Gift Link

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2️⃣ Best Of Article Club: Twelve Minutes And A Life

I’ll keep recommending this article until everyone reads it (or purposely chooses not to read it). It’s probably my #2 all-time selection, after “When Things Go Missing,” by Kathryn Schulz. I wouldn’t say “Twelve Minutes and a Life” is one of my favorites; that would suggest I enjoyed reading it. Enjoy isn’t the word I’d use. But in terms of the quality of its writing, and in terms of its message, and how brilliantly Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Mitchell S. Jackson makes certain we remember that Ahmaud Arbery was a person who was loved — well, this piece is unparalleled. Mr. Jackson writes:

Ahmaud Marquez Arbery was more than a viral video. He was more than a hashtag or a name on a list of tragic victims. He was more than an article or an essay or posthumous profile. He was more than a headline or an op-ed or a news package or the news cycle. He was more than a retweet or shared post. He, doubtless, was more than our likes or emoji tears or hearts or praying hands. He was more than an R.I.P. t-shirt or placard. He was more than an autopsy or a transcript or a police report or a live-streamed hearing. He, for damn sure, was more than the latest reason for your liberal white friend’s ephemeral outrage. He was more than a rally or a march. He was more than a symbol, more than a movement, more than a cause. He. Was. Loved.“

✚ This article won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, “for a deeply affecting account of the killing of Ahmaud Arbery that combined vivid writing, thorough reporting, and personal experience to shed light on systemic racism in America.” It was also chosen one of Article Club’s best articles of 2021.

✚ Mr. Jackson joined us in October 2022 to talk about his piece, “Looking For Clarence Thomas” (gift link). It was one of my all-time favorite Article Club interviews, mostly because Mr. Jackson gets into it about his writing process.

By Mitchell S. Jackson • Runner’s World • 26 mins • Gift Link

Here’s young Article Clubber Ayka reading a book about a cat and a trombonist. Know the title? Big thanks to loyal reader Sele for the photo.

3️⃣ AI And The Death of Student Writing

For the past 12 years, Lisa Lieberman has been teaching freshman composition at community colleges in California’s Central Valley. She loves discussing feminism in Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour and totalitarianism in The Handmaid’s Tale. But lately, she doesn’t enjoy grading. But it’s not because grading takes forever. Rather, it’s because at least one-third of her students are using artificial intelligence to write their essays. What is there to do about it? she asks in this well-written essay.

If you like a good dose of nostalgia, you’ll love this piece, especially toward the end, when Ms. Lieberman remembers her days at UC Berkeley, a young English major, reading Chaucer on a grassy knoll, under a shady tree. “There was nothing better,” she writes. “It felt like magic.”

By Lisa Lieberman • The Chronicle of Higher Education • 6 mins • Gift Link

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4️⃣ Gays Against Briggs

Since its founding three years ago, Moms for Liberty has urged its supporters to stand up for parental rights so that teachers don’t groom their kids to become trans. “It is not a question of civil rights or human rights, but it is one of parents’ rights and simply one of morality,” they might say.

Except they didn’t say this. This is what California State Senator John Briggs said in 1977, in his quest to ban gays and lesbians from teaching in public schools.

The Slow Burn podcast — always outstanding at pointing out the connections between present-day controversies and their historical counterparts — is dedicating Pride Month to tell the story of how the LGBTQ community fought back against Proposition 6, otherwise known as the Briggs Initiative. Even though I don’t know what déjà vu really means (it’s French!), listening to this podcast, that’s how I felt.

By Christina Cautericci • Slow Burn • 50 min • Apple Podcasts

Thank you for reading this week’s issue. Hope you liked it. 😀

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