++Kiese Laymon on Black revision, repayment, and renewal. +
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++Part of The Fairness Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world. +
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+Two days after an officer shot Ma’Khia Bryant in the back, and one day after an officer shot Andrew Brown in the back of the head, I asked my friend, Ray Gunn, if he was tired of talking to white folks about Black death. Gunn told me he didn’t understand my question. +
++I repeated it. +
++Gunn asked if I was getting paid for these conversations I was having with white Americans about Black death. I told him sometimes. He asked me why I would ever talk to white folks about Black death if I wasn’t getting paid. +
++“You know,” I told him, “like on social media …” +
++Gunn shook his head. +
++“Or sometimes, you know, folks call you because they …” +
++Gunn sucked his teeth. +
++“I mean, I’m a teacher and you know, like …” +
++Gunn looked lightweight disgusted. +
++He reminded me that he was a teacher too. “But that,” he said, “that’s not Black teacher work. That’s white family work.” +
++Gunn told me he hadn’t had an actual conversation with a white person in 14 years, not out of protest but because there just weren’t any white folks at his job, in his house, at his church, on his social media, or in his phone. “Now, if the check was right,” he said, “I’d be a grinning, hustling-ass race whisperer. I’d be talking to everything white. Rice. Milk. Pillows.” +
++I fell out laughing. +
++Gunn and I met in college in Jackson, Mississippi, 28 years ago. I was a first-year student from Jackson and Gunn was a super-senior from Winona by way of Chicago. The first day I met Gunn, he was posted up in the quad, setting up a picnic for his partner, V. +
++Later that night, during our first conversation, he taught me how to make sure the ironed quilt you set out for your partner smelled like their second-favorite scent. “That means you gotta ask them what they favorite scents are,” he told me. “If the quilt ain’t ironed and smelling right, wash it and iron it again. Don’t use starch though, unless that’s her second-favorite smell. But you gotta ask.” +
++Gunn knew he was talking about love. +
++I thought he was talking about “revision,” a word our professors and high school teachers believed necessitated us reducing all of our Black rhetorical abundance into meager-ass absolutes. In my own sloppy work, on and off the page, I was beginning to understand “revision” as a dynamic practice of revisitation, premised on ethically reimagining the ingredients, scope, and primary audience of one’s initial vision. Revision required witnessing and testifying. Witnessing and testifying required rigorous attempts at remembering and imagining. If revision was not God, revision was everything every God ever asked of believers. +
++In subsequent months, Gunn and I became boys, coworkers, cousins, forever family. When we weren’t together, we talked about “we” and “us” far more than we talked about “I.” We wrote En Vogue fan fiction. We memorized every word of Menace 2 Society and every syllable of Ready to Die. We invented words that should already have existed and new definitions for words as old as American exceptionalism. +
++We lived together in a tiny apartment on Capitol Street. We donated plasma for money right off of Fortification. We worked as porters on State Street. We stole white people’s food when there was white people’s food to be stolen. We borrowed massive cereal dispensers filled with Lucky Charms out of our college cafeteria because we were tired of Magic Stars. We jacked light bread off of bread trucks on the Reservoir. We dined, dashed, and left a tip at every Denny’s in central Mississippi. We used Gunn’s food stamps to get scallops and the good ramen to celebrate his little sister moving down to Mississippi. +
++We were poor. We were happy. We were not happy about being poor. But neither of us longed to be rich. We longed for healthy choices, second chances, and good love. +
++Then, after getting kicked out of our college for the theft of white folks’ food — sike! I mean white folks’ library books — I left Mississippi for Ohio, Indiana, and eventually New York. +
++When I returned to Mississippi 20 years later, even though my job was in a much more monied, neo-Confederate part of the state, I looked forward to living an hour from Gunn, who now worked as a teacher in a detention center for kids awaiting sentencing. I couldn’t wait to regularly hear the wavy inflections in Gunn’s voice when he did the opposite of humblebrag about his students and his own children’s grades. +
++I wanted to act as if nothing had changed in our relationship since we first saw each other as young men. I wanted Gunn to forget the summer of 2010 when he asked if he could bring his daughter up to college where I taught in New York. We hadn’t seen each other in six years. I agreed to take Gunn and his daughter on a tour of campus and then to the South Bronx, home of Gunn’s favorite emcee. +
++I ended up lying about an emergency when they got to town because I didn’t want Gunn to see that I’d gained more than 120 pounds since we’d last seen each other. I didn’t want Gunn’s daughter, my goddaughter, to look at me with disgust. I didn’t want to be reminded of what I’d allowed my insides to become, nor the heart meat I’d become addicted to eating. +
++So I chose to harm all three of us. I lied, and I ran from my goddaughter and the one person on Earth I literally had no reason to run from. +
++Gunn told me he understood what I was saying because he’d lied and run from me, too. “We ain’t young. We ain’t even middle-aged,” he said. “We just straight-up old and ain’t no models of how to be straight-up old and Black and lonely. I lied to you so many times because I was ashamed. We here now.” +
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+I can’t write about Ray Gunn without thinking about fairness and repair. In my laziness, I’ve conflated repair and restoration, just as I’ve lazily conflated pain with trauma, pleasure with desire, progress with liberation, honesty with truth, and fairness with equity. Restoration and repair are something we are worthy of in life and death, in relationships and solo, but they are not the same word. +
++Being a Black Mississippian means you will spend a lifetime repairing wounds created by the worst of white Mississippians in hopes of some kind of economic or moral renewal. This is not fair, nor is it fair that we are expected to make Black abundance out of that repair. This, however, is a part of our lineage. +
++The white family in America appears to have a lineage as well. The metastasized, excused unwellness in white families, monied and poor, is responsible for anti-Black terror happening in this nation’s schools, prisons, hospitals, neighborhoods, and banks. This is the work of folks who despise revision nearly as much as they despise themselves. Abolish police, bullets, missiles, and prisons all we want (and some of us truly want!), and most white American families in the US will do everything possible to make more. And in some ways, that’s their business. Cleaning up the messes that seep from these families, we’ve been taught, is what Black folk in this nation do well. +
++But I don’t want us to clean up the messes of white families. I want them to stop creating and pushing public policy that encourages us to die prematurely. I want them to pay my Grandmama what she is owed for a lifetime of literally, figuratively, and spiritually cleaning up their messes. +
++We have far too many messes of our own. At my worst, I have run away from our lineage of repair and renewal when I’ve harmed folks I loved. Every time we run away from an abusive mess, a negligent mess, a lethal mess we helped create, we leave something essential for someone targeted for premature death to clean up. That is humiliation. +
++That is not fair. +
++Family can help us repair. Family, chosen and by birth, can also significantly aid in helping those who eat our suffering effectively wipe us off the face of the Earth. Repair what you helped break, my Grandmama taught me. Restore what responsibly loved you, I learned from Gunn. And revise, revise, revise with your family and friends. Collective freedom is impossible without interpersonal repair. +
++I’d hoped this piece could be an extended exploration of the paradoxical economic dimensions of Black friendship during the pandemic. I wanted this piece to open, fold, and crumple the tired ways we talk about revision in this nation. I wanted to write about Gunn’s relationship to the state as a Black man who loves Black people, and a Black man who has found work in a detention center for mostly Black and Mexican young people. +
++But before I could write that, Gunn and I needed to talk with each other about what repair and renewal mean in our middle-age relationships with each other, with the dead, with the Earth. We have to be as concerned with the question of what we’re owed as we are with the question of what we owe us. I suspect, with rigorous, tender exploration, we will find that the answer to both of those questions is everything. +
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+One morning in the spring of 1995, I woke up to this strange, nasally voice coming from the bathroom of the apartment Gunn and I shared. The voice was overenunciating the “or” sound in “elevatOR.” The bathroom door was cracked and Gunn was in the mirror, not simply practicing talking “proper,” but also practicing verbally and vocally becoming a Black man he imagined white folks might fairly compensate. +
++“Nigga,” I remember saying to him through the door. “What are you doing?” +
++“Trying to get this money,” he said. +
++During our most recent conversation, I asked Gunn if he remembers that day in 1995. After some uncomfortable silence, Gunn answered me. And we talked. And we listened. And we were honest about what we need for repair and what we might be incapable of sharing or accepting in this piece. Before hanging up, Gunn reiterated that Black people, especially poor Black people, need checks for the checks we’ve been shorted since we were brought here. Until those checks are issued, Gunn says again, he has nothing to say to white folks about the failings of white folks when he himself has failed so many Black folks. +
++I get it. +
++Near the end of my conversation with Gunn, he answered the goofy question, “Do you have hope in America?” with the only appropriate answer that should ever be given to that trite-ass question. +
++“I have faith in us.” +
++When my editor asked me if I could write about “fairness” after the George Floyd verdict, I knew there was nothing new I could say to white Americans about their investments in Black suffering. It wasn’t only that it had all been said, made, and written; it had all been said, made, and written by the greatest sayers, makers, and writers in history. So I started over, and I scrapped the traditional fetishizing portals of entry into anti-racism. +
++I decided I’d rather write to us and for us about the paradoxes of revision, restoration, and repair in our friendships. Instead of explaining something that has already been explained and making a spectacle of Black death, I decided to write something that makes me feel good about a man from Winona, Mississippi, who has loved me whole and halted my premature death. +
++Today, that is the most loving thing I can do to my insides and Gunn’s. Today, that feels fair. +
++Kiese Laymon is the author of three books, including the novel Long Division. +
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++Anyone who says they know exactly what’s happening in the economy is lying. +
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++The pandemic economy has been strange and unpredictable from the get-go. +
++Throughout the past 14 months, the twists and turns have been surprising: The housing market boomed, the stock market soared, people got into day trading, everyone hoarded toilet paper, and lumber became a must-have. There’s been widespread disagreement about how much support from the government was needed, whether the country was doing too much or not enough, or whether help would come at all. We won’t know whether the country overshot or undershot the response for years, and there’s still uncertainty about what’s happening in the labor market, prices, and other areas. And the prevailing theme has been one that has nothing to do with the economy directly: As long as Covid-19 isn’t under control, the economy isn’t either. +
++“Having been a forecaster for 10 years, we were surprised all the time, because nobody has a crystal ball and particularly if you just pull out one data series, one month, there’s just no way,” said Claudia Sahm, a former Federal Reserve economist and now a senior fellow at the Jain Family Institute. “It’s going to be a wild ride; the data through the end of this year, they’re going to be tough.” +
++The country and the world are staring into a black box of uncertainty on the economy. It’s frustrating, but it’s also inevitable. Anyone who says they know exactly what is going on in the economy right now is lying. The same goes for anyone who says they know what’s going to happen next. +
++“Because of the unique nature of this crisis, there are going to be some swings,” said Mike Konczal, director of macroeconomic analysis at the Roosevelt Institute. “In a year, they’re going to be trivia questions, but right now we’re obsessing about them.” +
++Few people will probably remember two years from now that the price of used cars and trucks went up by 10 percent in April. +
++We know that the economy is different now than it was a year ago and that it will be different a year from now. What’s not clear is exactly how. And what we need now — including economists, experts, and policymakers — is the intellectual humility to recognize that’s the case. +
++“At this point, most things should be presumed temporary until proven permanent,” said Jed Kolko, chief economist at the jobs website Indeed. +
++It’s unnerving to admit what we don’t know, and the pandemic has been a real exercise in that. But after so long of staring into the abyss, maybe it’s time we embrace it. +
++
+The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported that the US economy added 266,000 jobs in April, far below the 1 million jobs economists expected, leaving many people shocked. The number was so shocking that CNBC reporter Steve Liesman double-checked it live on air. Nick Bunker, an economist at Indeed, wrote that it “might be one of the most disappointing jobs numbers of all time.” +
++Much of this is a question of expectations. Many economists have anticipated the labor market to bounce back quickly, and with the country still 8 million jobs from where it was pre-pandemic, a quarter-million-jobs-a-month recovery isn’t going to cut it. But one month of data isn’t really enough to definitively say what’s happening with jobs and workers; April could be a blip, or it could be a sign of an ongoing ominous trend. Many economists and experts are trying to extrapolate from it, but they’re also the same economists and experts who didn’t see it coming. +
++There are some things we do know: Employers are posting more jobs, and there is a growing demand to hire. We know that more people are getting vaccinated, and as that happens, hopefully, concerns about contracting Covid-19 will fade. We also know that caregiving is still a burden that many working parents face, and with the school year ending, taking care of kids and working is tough to balance. For some families, going back to work right now might not be worth it. The entire labor situation just is out of whack. +
++“The economy is reopening and restarting in a way that we really have never seen before, and we know that’s not all going to happen in sync,” Kolko said. “The rate at which employers become more eager to hire won’t match exactly the rate at which job seekers are more eager to start working.” +
++We also may not yet have a clear sense of what, exactly, just happened. In the April jobs report, the BLS also revised its numbers from previous months and said that the US actually added more jobs in February and fewer jobs in March than it initially reported. The situation is still fluid. Konczal pointed out that monthly revisions to the jobs report — the changes the BLS makes to its estimates of prior months — have been double to triple this year what they have been on average in the past 40 years. “The BLS is trying very hard in very difficult circumstances to get accurate surveys, but it is hard work.” +
++Some business groups, economists, and politicians have seized on the jobs numbers to push their own political priorities. The Chamber of Commerce, for example, called for the US to end expanded unemployment insurance benefits after the April jobs report, arguing that the extra $300 in weekly benefits is keeping people out of the workforce. A handful of states, all run by Republicans, have already announced their plans to wind down expanded unemployment programs next month. +
++Many employers now, and after every economic downturn, complain they can’t find workers and that the social safety net is keeping people on the sidelines. Progressives, meanwhile, insist that expanded unemployment isn’t keeping anyone out of the workforce at all, and if employers want people to take jobs, they should pay more. +
++It’s impossible to parse exactly what is motivating workers at the moment, and what is disincentivizing potential employees and to what extent. Unemployment insurance might allow some workers to rethink their priorities a little, but that doesn’t mean that rug should be pulled out from under them. +
++“There’s always this uncertainty, and it takes some time to get enough data to form a narrative,” Sahm said. “A complex phenomenon has complex causes.” +
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++Beyond the basic question of what’s going on in the economy, how permanent or fleeting is it? +
++Take, for example, inflation, which has been creeping up in some areas. The Consumer Price Index (CPI), which measures the average change in prices paid by consumers for things like food, clothes, housing, and transportation, ticked up by 4.2 percent in April compared to a year ago. And in some areas, such as gas and used cars, prices have gone up quite a bit. But the broader question on inflation — and the one the Federal Reserve is focused on as it tries to figure out its next steps on the economy — is whether that inflation is transitory, or to put it more plainly, temporary. Prior to the pandemic, inflation was running confoundingly low in the US economy, and economists were puzzled by why it wasn’t going up. Early on in the pandemic, the economy actually saw some deflation, meaning prices went down. Now, many economists say it’s okay to have some inflation, within reason, and they believe it will be short-lived. +
++“An episode of one-time price increases as the economy reopens is not likely to lead to persistent year-over-year inflation into the future,” said Fed Chair Jay Powell at an April news conference. +
++Again, it depends on how high inflation is and how long it lasts. +
++“The progressive economic agenda of spending through a downturn never promised zero inflation. It said the inflation there would be moderate and manageable,” said Lindsay Owens, interim executive director of the progressive think tank Groundwork Collaborative. +
++The persistent doubt of what is temporary and what is permanent in the burgeoning post-Covid-19 economy is hardly contained to inflation. It often plays out in high-level economic debates, but it’s easy to observe in day-to-day life, too. Plenty of people still don’t know when they’re going to go on vacation again, and when they do, where they’ll be comfortable going. Return-to-office plans are still being hatched, and what the future of work looks like is in flux. Whether or not white-collar workers wind up working from home more doesn’t just impact their companies, it also affects the businesses and workers that support them. +
++A lot of what’s going on in the economy isn’t going to show up in the data, and if and when it does, it won’t happen for a while. “It’s just this different world, and in this world we’re in, trying to address things at the scale that we are may mean that we don’t have the best tools to watch in real-time, or the way we talk about things aren’t the right way to talk about things,” Konczal said. +
++Perhaps a prime example of a rather unexpected development — and one of uncertain durability — is the housing frenzy. Early on in the pandemic, some people expected the housing market, like many parts of the economy, would struggle amid mass unemployment and widespread uncertainty. Instead, prices didn’t just hold steady, they soared. Preexisting trends, such as low mortgage rates and a cohort of home-ready millennials, combined with a pandemic-induced desire to get more space and out of the city, caused a surge in demand. And the supply just wasn’t there. Housing accessibility is not going away as a problem in the US, but the current mania for a single-family home that’s pushed prices so high could fade. Or maybe it won’t. Some economists predicted it would cool off months ago. +
++We shouldn’t overlook the curious developments in the economy that have been positive and heartening, either. An unprecedented amount of support from the government, from expanded unemployment to stimulus checks, has helped millions of people and kept them from slipping into poverty. Savings rates increased during the pandemic; credit card debt is falling to the point that it’s actually making life harder for banks. People have paused their student loan payments and been able to relax, a little, about the prospect of losing their homes. Part of what makes guessing what will happen in the economy next is that the country has never had a response like this before — no one knows what this amount of stimulus will do, or how quickly or how slowly. Or what will happen when some supports go away. +
++“The raw ability of the government to stabilize incomes, I think was remarkable given how weak American social infrastructure is,” Konczal said. “America can actually do things.” +
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+Nothing about the past year and change has been easy or exactly expected. In some ways, things have been better than anticipated — the vaccine arrived earlier than many believed possible, the economic downturn wasn’t as long and deep as expected, and the government stepped in multiple times to deliver much-needed support. In other ways, it’s been worse — hundreds of thousands of people have died, the economy has experienced a number of fits and starts, and an uneven recovery has taken hold. In other ways, the economy has just been, well, kind of odd (who could have expected a shortage of chicken wings, or a cyberattack on an oil pipeline?). +
++In retrospect, many of the developments in the economy make sense. Of course people bored at home decided to renovate. Of course stimulus checks would make people resort to short-term lenders a little less. The precariousness of domestic and global supply chains is hardly new, nor is the country’s inadequate child care system. +
++“To the extent we’re going to see a problem, it likely reflects long-standing problems we knew were problems before Covid,” Konczal said. +
++And Covid-19 exacerbated a lot of problems — problems we’re still reeling from and probably will be for a long time. It felt like the world fell apart in 2020, and it’s going to take a long time to put it back together. +
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++Together, the pandemic and the death of George Floyd revealed to all Americans the rampant inequities and stratifications many face. But is fairness the goal? +
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++It’s never been a secret that life isn’t fair; it bears out in countless racial, gendered, economic, and geographical ways throughout a lifetime. +
++But even the most privileged and the most sheltered were made to confront the stratification of American society in the past year, as the coronavirus pandemic laid bare the troubling disparities between those who could weather its financial and logistical disruptions to everyday life and those who could not; and between those who would survive its wrath and those who would not. The murder of George Floyd and subsequent protests and racial reckonings a year ago have only further illuminated these realities. +
++What this past year has shown us is that the concept of “fairness” is slippery. On the one hand, it’s a legible, admirable, seemingly unproblematic goal — enough for everyone, tit for tat, books balanced and parity achieved. It’s neat and it’s simple. +
++Fairness, it can also be argued, is the province of children. It’s for remote control dominance and ice cream cone distribution; it’s a way of reducing what ought to be multifaceted into a flat and faceless zero-sum transaction. “Life’s not fair!” is one of the most recognizable phrases kids who have just achieved a grasp of the English language can utter; “life’s not fair,” its natural rejoinder, serves as both an early entry point into the inherent inequities of the world and a catchall statement meant to justify whatever the adult uttering it happens to want in a given moment (generally peace, quiet, and a cupcake sans fingerprints in the frosting). It’s infantile and futile to desire fairness; it’s cruel and hopeless not to. +
++In this month’s issue of The Highlight, we explore this tension. Each piece wrestles with a different definition of fairness, from a feature by labor writer Sarah Jaffe on the false promise of the gig economy to a comic by Melinda Fakuade and Kazimir Lee examining how couples split bills. +
++At its most insidious, fairness can be trotted out under the guise of equality only to be used as a tool of oppression against the most vulnerable, as Jessica W. Luther writes in her piece about the wave of legislation meant to exclude trans girls and women from participating in sports. At its best, as seen in Carol Kuruvilla’s interviews with seven religious leaders, it operates in tandem alongside its more powerful cousins — kindness, restoration, and, above all, justice — to make a blueprint for a world worth aspiring to. And sometimes, as Kiese Laymon so beautifully writes in an essay about Blackness in America, fairness is shunting aside what’s asked of you, and giving yourself the grace to revisit, revise, and reexamine what you are owed and what you yourself owe your people. +
++These pieces together raise the notion that fairness in and of itself isn’t, and shouldn’t be, the goal toward which we strive. It’s simply the most obvious result of a far more complex interplay of needs and systems. As Imam Omar Suleiman, president of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, told Kuruvilla, “If justice is the tree, fairness is the fruit.” +
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++The playing field +
++Anti-trans bills purport to address “fairness” in sports. But sports have never been fair. +
++By Jessica W. Luther +
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Kailey Whitman for Vox
++The battle for the future of “gig” work (coming Tuesday) +
++Ride-sharing companies are pushing to make a third category of “independent” worker the law of the land. Drivers say the notion of independence is little more than a mirage. +
++By Sarah Jaffe +
++
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Carlos Basabe for Vox
++What we owe and are owed (coming Wednesday) +
++Kiese Laymon on Black revision, repayment, and renewal. +
++By Kiese Laymon +
++
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Getty Images/iStockphoto
++How can we make it right? What the world’s religions have to say about justice. (coming Thursday) +
++From a Buddhist to a humanist, seven faith leaders weigh in on building a better world. +
++By Carol Kuruvilla +
++
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Kazimir Lee
++The last frontier in modern romance is money (coming Friday) +
++As dating and marriage evolve, so is the way couples are splitting finances. +
++By Melinda Fakuade and Kazimir Lee +
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