Rebecca Traister Is Happy to Be Mad
00:00From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.If you watch the video of two protesters with Senator Jeff Flake in an elevator during the Kavanaugh hearings,if you saw them confront him with so much anger at the way women have been treated for so long,the way they said to a U.S. Senator, don't look away from me, look at me and tell me it doesn't matter.If you look at the way Flake changed its position afterwards, it's all becoming clear that something absolutely remarkable is taking place in America right now.This is very much the subject of Rebecca Traster's new book, Good and Mad, the Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger.The book combines a kind of history of women's uprisings with an analysis of the Me Too movement.
00:54Traster is written for New York Magazine, L, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and her last book,was called All the Single Ladies, Unmarried Women, and the Rise of an Independent Nation.Rebecca Traster and I spoke on the very day that Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaughboth testified about her sexual assault allegations.Rebecca, there's no way to avoid this. We are talking now just hours after the Senate JudiciaryCommittee has done its questioning. There was a very specific story being told by Professor Ford,as well as Ramirez and others,in a very particular milieu as well.
01:34What did the specifics tell you?The specifics of their stories.Well, we are getting a very full and detailed viewof cultures around wealth, white,fundamentally patriarchal power centersthat begin in, you know, when people are teenagers,the prep school, you know, DeborahRamirez's story, which was about how she was an outsider to this very elite, fratty, hard drinking, badly behaved, relatively repercussion-free, social circle of extremely wealthy, privileged white men who were all on paths toward immense power.
02:20And the narrative of it was when I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible.Boys will be boys.Right.Who amongst us has not?Right? Like that's, and that's a, again, that's about the sort of invisibility of certain kinds of power abuses.I write about in the book and something that I've become kind of obsessed with and thinking both about how, for example, a Black Lives Matter movement has been talked about in a mainstream press and then watching the same kinds of things around the Me Too movement.It's helped me to understand a little bit about how when power is abused in the direction that is sort of natural, the more powerful do something bad.or harmful or even violent to the less powerful.
03:03It's sort of invisible, right?Oh, oh, he was a drunk boy.Of course he did this.Like, what young man, what 17-year-old healthy young man with a sex drive and a keglike, hasn't behaved that way?It's like indiscernible as harm in some way.In your book, Good and Mad, you write very early in the book,I am a white woman who has been angry in my life and my work,
03:26occasionally on my own behalf, but more often about politics.about inequity and the grotesque unfairness of the world and this country, how it was built, and who it still excludes and systematically diminished. And then you're off to the races.This book is in large measure about anger, the legitimacy of anger, the employment of anger historically toward good. What set you off on it?It was an attempt to get my thoughts clear after the election.Did that take some doing?Oh, God, yes.I didn't know.I was wrestling with what my job was.
04:07I was wrestling with what my work was.How do you mean?I was very muddy about what the story was that I needed to tell.I have to say that I haven't talked about this before.And there's a degree to which I was deeply.obsessed by the question of the white women. I was acutely aware of my identity as a white woman.The degree to which my work has been blinkered by my whiteness, my work on feminism,the degree to which I have been pushed to be better, to think more clearly about race and
04:42class, that's been a big part of my evolution as a writer. And there was something that had happenedright before the election. I'd been on part of a podcast.with a bunch of women, and one of them had said about the young white men who was like the classic Bernie supporter.Like she had said something like, where are you guys out there trying to persuade people to vote for Hillary?Because it's your guys.It's white men who are not voting for her.Where are the left white guys?Go get your boys.
05:13Right.That was the phrase that she'd used.Go get your boys.Right.And it was not a surprise to me that white women had voted for Donald Trump.But I was acutely aware of this demographic, and I felt some responsibility.And I'm very sympathetic to the argument, which is like, leave them be.It is not worth the investment in trying to persuade white women to be on our side.
05:34There's a woman in my book, Jess Morales, who says she worked on the Hillary campaign.And she was like, look, this was about persuading white women to not be Phyllis Schlafly.And that has never, ever worked.They're always going to be Phyllis Schlafly, right?I understand and have sympathy with that.Like, just let them rot, right?They want to support a system that fundamentally oppresses them and that oppresses other people.Great.
05:55But I felt that phrase, go get your boys, was echoing in my own head.And I think that part of what I wanted to do was also think about white women and what impulsives and messages are at work on white women.And I felt like it was my responsibility to examine race from the perspective of, of, of,whiteness in conjunction with looking at gender. And then the anger, so I was feeling that,but I wasn't sure how to do it, right? And that was the question about my work. How do I do? What dowhat is my job? What's my, what's the story here? But everything was so clouded. And I was on awalk with my husband between Christmas and New Year's of that year, since 2016 and 2017. And I wastrying to explain to him the despair I was feeling about like not knowing what my role was
06:47supposed to be. What was I, what was my work going to be?Professionally. Professionally, yeah.And I said, I just can't think straight, derives. I'm so mad. And he was like, well,maybe that's what your work is. And I said, what do you mean? And he goes, well,maybe that's what you need to write about is anger. And as soon as he said it, he's not awriter. He was just something he was responding to and what, but suddenly in that, in that exchange,I'm not exaggerating when I said it was the first feeling of like clarity.and lightness in my head that I'd had at that point in two months.
07:19It is interesting that a lot of the exemplars of constructive anger in the book, historically, are black women.Shirley Chisholm, Florence Kennedy, who I remember well watching on public access television for hours in her great hats.Rosa Parks.And of course, the mother of Emmett Till, that's not by any coincidence.That's not by accident.No, not at all. Women of color have often been not only the leading activist organizers and the people who first gave voice and forum to a lot of the transformative social and political movements that have reshaped America. They also often have done the thinking. I mean, Polly Murray, who's somebody I write about in this book, Polly Murray was credited by both Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg for the intellectual work she did laying out the framework for racial and gendered inequity in this country.and laying the groundwork for the laws that would ultimately wind up protecting and trying to ameliorate the kind of gendered and racial inequality that she was trying to address.She's so very rarely credited as this leader.
08:33And Florence Kennedy, I haven't heard the name Florence Kennedy in years.I mean, she's very much of the generation of Gloria Steinem or a little even older.She and Gloria Steinem were speaking partners on the road, yes.Right. Tell us a little bit about Florence Kennedy.So Florence Kennedy was a black feminist lawyer.She was outrageous for her time, but I think she would be outrageous now.I think so.In her demeanor and her willingness to be vocally, profanely, unapologetically and joyfully pissed off about everything she was pissed off about.
09:11And there was a lot of it. She was mad about racism. She was mad about sexism.She wasn't going to play nice at all.Now, you wrote about a time when you were, you were working in a male-dominated office,and you found yourself in tears, you're angry and you're crying,until you write a chilly, hard-ass manager, those are in quotes, a woman,pulled you into a stairway and said to you, they don't know you're furious.They think you're sad and will be pleased because they got to you.Where were you working?
09:42What was going on?was at the New York Observer.I've never talked about this with the woman who said it,and I don't know if she even remembers.And I don't remember, to be honest,I don't remember what I was angry about.I mean, I can take guesses.But I was, the thing that was astounding to me is that this is a person who had always intimidated me,
10:06because she wasn't, there was nothing outwardly emotional,no sense that she was paying close attention to the experiences of the people.was just she was an incredibly efficient, incredibly talented manager of people and of copy.And the fact that she saw in sort of what was a split second, something that I wouldn't havebeen able to describe as soon as she said it, I was like, I am furious. Of course I'm, of course I'm cryingbecause I'm furious. I think that's such a common experience for women.Which is to express what out at least seems the sadness, but inside is rage. Yes. Yes.It's hammered home to us so often that rage, our rage is fundamentally in express.
10:45because if we express it, we will not be heard, we will not be taken seriously, will be seen as, you know, crazy, unhinged, ball-busting, unattractive, invalid, marginal, like it will go badly for us if we express our anger directly. And I think that I write about this in the book, that one of the tactics that so many of us turn to, we cry, which is a fundamentally more acceptable mode of emotion for women. It's, it is in part because,of what that manager said to me. It will be understood as vulnerability, which is more acceptablein women. To me. Right. Now, that's especially true for white women, by the way. There's a racialdynamic in terms of crying as being something that can elicit sympathy, and that sympathy isvery much more likely to accrue to a crying woman if she is white. What are you saying? What is a woman ofcolor more likely to do. Well, women of color have written about this very beautifully that the vision ofthe traditionally vulnerable femininity that garners sympathy or empathy is very often the sufferingwhite woman. The crying black woman doesn't have that same kind of imaginative hold. And more than that,
12:05white women's tears have often been used to cover for instances.of racism. I mean, it's the vision of the suffering white women and the need to protect herhas often been the cover for lynching for, you know, for racialized racist violence. So I just want to,you know, when we talk about the tears of women being something that makes them vulnerable,that is a dynamic that applies especially if you are a white woman. I really do hopemen read this book in great numbers as well as women. And for me, there was a,an especially affecting moment that I'm going to touch on. Your husband comes to you. It's just as theMe Too movement is really exploding. And he says, I'm shocked. The profusion of it, the violence of it,
12:55the horror of so many stories that we've heard about in the last year about sexual harassment andsexual assault, it was all shocking to him, shocking to me. And he's coming to you in some wayfor what you call feminist absolution. So what's to be learned here? What can you?you tell him and really by extension what can you tell me well i think that this i my hope is that thisis a moment of education and readjustment of the the view of of a full human experience for a lot ofmen who have just not seen the have not realized how common how ubiquitous how every day thesekinds of experiences are aren't all men blinkered to some of the group this is part of opening eyesmen are learning something about the experience of not being men in the world that they've been blind to.
13:50And yet much of the learning comes out in terms of defensiveness.For some, for some.And it's a process.And I don't, I don't.And worry about, you know, thinking about, oh, my God, in high school, maybe I said something terrible.I made a bad joke in the office.That's what you're all at all.For all of my anger.
14:05And this is an angry book that I've written.And I am very angry at men.and I talk about the complexities of the tricks of a women's movement or a feminist movement,is that it asks you to identify as your oppressor, a group of people who are your intimates,your loved ones, the men you share beds with and families with, and who are your brothersand your fathers and your sons and your friends.It asks of us to complicate those incredibly intimate relationships that are often lovingand that are often based in need and dependence on the men on whom we rely.
14:36I really do feel for the men for whom this is difficult.We are changing rules part way through the game.That's what this process is asking us to do.That is hard.But there's no other way to do it.We don't get to just start fresh with a generation starting now, right?If you actually want to change the way that the power structures work and the abuses that they permit and you want to say, actually, we don't want to have those abuses anymore.We want to make them no longer acceptable.
15:05That is going to mean that there are some people who are caught in the middle who entered the world with one set of expectations and one set of assumptions about how they could behave and are being told halfway through that that's no longer acceptable.And that has a cost, it has a toll.And I do feel for those guys that doesn't mean that I don't think the process is necessary and I stand behind it.And I don't think I'm alone in this.Most of the people that I know who are fervent proponents of the Me Too.movement and of this difficult, painful process are incredibly conflicted about it, too.We don't want to be the police who determine if somebody should lose their job or not losetheir job. And a lot of the anti-me-2 stuff says, oh, it lacks nuance and it's just a bunch of
15:49executioners. No, everybody I know who is behind this movement, you know, most intensely andfervently feels incredible conflict. And so I feel tremendous sympathy for the guys, too.The book, and it's a remarkable one, is Good and Mad.Rebecca Traster, thanks so much.Thanks so much for having me, David.Rebecca Traster's new book is called Good and Mad,the Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger.I'm David Remnick, and that's our podcast for today.
16:24I want to thank you for joining us.I hope you'll tune in for our next episode.The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yardswith additional music by Lexus Quadrato.Our team includes Alex Barron,Emily Boutin, Ave Cario,Riannon Corby, Jill Duboff,
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