‘Black Flight’ out of Chicago

In a cover story for the Chicago Reader, urban planner Pete Saunders writes about how Black residents are fleeing Chicago in large numbers for suburbs and metropolitan areas in other regions as the city’s white, Asian American, Latinx, and multiracial populations increase. This “Black flight” reverses demographic trends of last century, which saw an estimated 7 million African Americans pouring into cities in the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast from the rural South during the Great Migration. The Encyclopedia of Chicago says that more than 500,000 of those who left settled in Chicago; according to Curbed, “At some points during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, more than 1,000 new arrivals a week came through booming areas such as Bronzeville, many of them hoping to work in the heavy industry and steel plants on the city’s southeast side.”

Saunders suggests a combination of factors have caused the current exodus, including slow declines in Chicago’s violent crime rate, school closures and a lack of investment in important local institutions. Shifts in the kinds of jobs available and, perhaps, a pull to the South of generations before have driven Black Chicagoans to Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston. Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Diego are also losing Black population, but the decline in Chicago, at “four to ten times the rate of the other three,” has been most dramatic. According to the Urban Institute, by 2030, it’s estimated that Chicago will have lost more than 500,000 Black residents in 50 years. Saunders believes that systematic racial discrimination, the biggest driver of Blacks to cities during  the Great Migration, is the key driver of the new pattern as well:

Segregation has created a lack of economic mobility. I’d argue that Chicago is economically stratified to the extent that upward mobility for blacks here is particularly difficult. The CMAP [Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning] report noted that the unemployment rate for blacks in Chicagoland stubbornly stays at more than twice the region’s rate, and that more than 60 percent of blacks who left the region were without a local job when they did so. Networks are hard to penetrate. The power structure is rigid. There’s also a lack of residential mobility. Chicago and its suburbs are more open to people of color than ever before, but blacks here are acutely aware that people still attach stigmas to places we move to. This has the impact of stagnating or lowering property values and rents where blacks move in large numbers, often wiping whole chunks of the region from the minds of many. The south side and south and southwest burbs don’t even occur to many whites seeking affordable options.

The hallmark of Chicago (and rust-belt) segregation has been black avoidance. Since the Great Migration the practice has been to explicitly or implicitly contain blacks within certain areas. But as metro areas got bigger, transportation more of a challenge, and city living more desirable, new attention was given to long-forgotten places. Here in Chicago that started with former white ethnic areas (Lincoln Park, Wicker Park, etc). Within the last ten to 20 years that expanded to include largely Latino areas (Logan Square, Humboldt Park, Pilsen). But for the most part the pattern of black avoidance remains.

In places with stronger economies, like New York and Washington, D.C., there’s been more direct engagement—even conflict—between white newcomers and longtime black residents in many communities. Spike Lee famously ranted about gentrification arriving in black neighborhoods in Brooklyn five years ago, and the area surrounding D.C.’s historically black Howard University has witnessed significant change in the last decade. But the rust-belt pattern is one of indirect conflict. Places collapse, then new groups come in.

Read the story

‘Salvini’s Decree’ Evicts Italian Migrants from Temporary Shelter

For the New York Review of Books‘ daily edition, Caitlin L. Chandler examines the fallout from of Italy’s new law, the Security and Immigration Decree, known as “Salvini’s Decree,” after deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini. The measure, passed last November, eradicates a class of humanitarian protections for individuals who do not qualify for refugee status, but who needed to leave their countries due to “violence, famine, or human trafficking.” According to Chandler, before the Decree, 25% of Italy’s asylum seekers avoided deportation under this category of protections. The law’s implementation has meant a rash of evictions from squats, where it’s estimated that 10,000 migrants have taken up shelter.

Chandler notes how media portrayal and racist, anti-immigrant language from leaders of Italy’s far right manipulated public opinion and drove passage of the Decree:

Although immigrants comprise only 8 percent of Italy’s population, Salvini rails against “the invasion” and has blocked rescue ships from landing at Italian ports (“porti chiusi,” he likes to brag on Twitter and Instagram, meaning “harbors closed”). Despite the fact that, since 2014, the share of crimes committed by foreigners is decreasing within every single region in Italy, anti-immigrant sentiment, stoked by Salvini’s government, is at a dangerous, all-time high.

Salvini and his party stoke fears around migration by portraying migrants as criminals. Over the past ten years, overall crime has decreased in Italy by 8.3 percent, and crimes committed by foreigners have also fallen, with convictions at an all-time low. But each time a crime occurs in an immigrant neighborhood or when non-Italian citizens stand accused, Salvini exploits it. Such was the case with the brutal rape and murder of a sixteen-year-old girl, Desirée Mariottini, in a squat in San Lorenzo, an immigrant neighborhood in Rome. Two Senagalese men, one Nigerian man, and one Ghanaian man were arrested in connection with her assault and death. Salvini visited San Lorenzo and laid a rose at her memorial, then said he would come back with a bulldozer.

The Italian public grows ever more fearful. In a 2018 study, over half of Italians greatly overestimated how many migrants were in the country. Meanwhile, in the two months after Salvini became interior minister, Italian civil society groups recorded twelve shootings, two murders, and thirty-three physical assaults against immigrants.

Read the story

The Classroom Origins of Toxic Masculinity

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2019 | 8 minutes (1,974 words)

Covington Catholic High School, St. Michael’s College School, Georgetown Preparatory School. All three are Catholic, mostly white, mostly rich, all-boys, and all three have recently made the news. At Covington, student Nick Sandmann went viral after a video emerged showing him, surrounded by a bunch of white classmates in the same glaring MAGA hats fresh off the same anti-abortion rally, mocking Native American Indigenous Peoples March attendee Nathan Phillips. At St. Mike’s school — Canadian, suggesting we may be less nice than we are similar — several students were charged after a video appeared on social media in which their fellow classmates were assaulted, one with a broomstick. Eight boys were eventually expelled after several incidents were investigated, all, according to reports, involving football and basketball players. Georgetown Prep, meanwhile, made the news when Christine Blasey Ford accused U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of assaulting her when they were teenagers while fellow Georgetown student Mark Judge watched. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” she said. The quote reverberated across social media once again after the Covington video went viral.

“I’d think it important to consider the presence of the peer group, since for boys and young men that’s often the crucial public in shaping the enactment of masculinities,” says University of Sydney Professor Emerita Raewyn Connell, an Australian sociologist and one of the first to carve out men’s studies as discipline in the 1970s. She is referring to the Covington video but could just as well be talking about any of the other schools, or any other all-boys school in America, really. She says that “collective bullying behaviour” can target anything from gender to sexuality to race. Same-sex environments can be particularly noxious, Connell explained in a 2003 report: “Some institutions designed for boys, such as sporting clubs and boys’ schools, define a strongly-marked, even exaggerated, masculinity in their organizational culture.” These days we would call that toxic masculinity, but back in the ‘80s, Connell, who wrote the seminal 1995 book Masculinities, called it something else.

“Hegemonic masculinity” was first coined in 1982 by Connell and co-authors Dean Ashenden, Sandra Kessler, and Gary Dowsett in Making the Difference: Schools, Families and Social Division. The Australian government had released a report in 1975 — “Girls, School and Society” — which prompted the 1982 study, in which students, teachers, and parents in local schools were interviewed in order to explore social inequality. They did their field work in the late ‘70s, an era in which questions of sex were in vogue following the women’s liberation movement and subsequent feminist critiques of the patriarchy. “It wasn’t that gender hierarchies had become more pronounced,” Connell tells me, “but that debate about them had become more intense.”

Though certain elements of “hegemonic masculinity” were later heavily critiqued, the fundamental concept persists, which is that of a dominant masculinity in any given situation that supersedes all other masculinities around it. “Because the concept of hegemonic masculinity is based on practice that permits men’s collective dominance over women, it is not surprising that in some contexts, hegemonic masculinity actually does refer to men’s engaging in toxic practices — including physical violence — that stabilize gender dominance in a particular setting,” Connell and James W. Messerschmidt wrote in their 2005 reevaluation of the original theory. That same year, these “toxic practices” were dubbed elsewhere by another academic as “toxic masculinity,” marking the term that 14 years later has become so pervasive its origins have been almost entirely lost.

* * *

One of the first appearances of toxic masculinity in the mainstream press was in a 1990 New Republic article by Daniel Gross. “The Gender Rap: ‘Toxic Masculinity’ and Other Male Troubles” focused on a new-age movement that appeared to resonate with a healthy number of American men (the first annual Men’s Studies Conference had launched the year before). Gross credited Shepherd Bliss — who preferred the term “mythopoetic” to “new age” — with coining toxic masculinity as a phrase “to describe that part of the male psyche that is abusive.” Bliss comes from a military family and says his authoritarian father embodied the term he defines to me as “behavior that diminishes women, children, other men.” He still has a men’s group, which he separates from “negative” men’s rights groups, and he emphasizes that the expression he invented is “not meant to condemn all males.”

The California-based retiree is surprised his ‘80s neologism has gotten so much attention lately, considering no one really seemed to notice it before. Bliss couldn’t recall exactly when or where he first uttered “toxic masculinity,” but claims it was around the time he named his men’s group. That would have been in 1986, when he was a contributing editor of Yoga Journal and wrote about how the mythopoetic movement “seeks to learn from ancestors and retrieve wisdom from the past that can be applied to the lives of men today.” The man he proposed was the opposite of the urban industrial model; he lived more primally, with stronger father-son connections, male bonding, and a close relationship with the land. Bliss held $200 healing retreats that were attended by about 50,000 men looking to get back to literal nature, but also the figurative nature of man. “I use[d] a medical term because I believe that like every sickness, toxic masculinity has an antidote,” he told TNR. (In practice, this antidote, according to one attendee, involved “farting, crawling around on all fours, wrestling, crafting animal masks, and butting heads.”)

So, yes, technically toxic masculinity was coined in the mid-’80’s, but Connell had already recognized the concept. And there are reasons Bliss’ version didn’t really take off outside of that side-eyeing TNR article. This was the era of the feminist backlash, so there wasn’t much room for a backlash against men outside the minutiae of academia. And Yoga Journal hadn’t exactly cracked the mainstream — the ‘80’s were, ironically, not a very radical time — and even if it had, toxic masculinity would have still been bathed in a vague fanciful hippie-ish light. Not to mention that Bliss’ definition of his own term was itself a little airy-fairy. No, masculinity was too impervious for yoga — we needed science.

Scholars point to psychiatrist Dr. Terry A. Kupers as the source of “toxic masculinity” as we now know it, particularly his definition in a 2005 prison study: “Toxic masculinity is the constellation of socially regressive male traits that serve to foster domination, the devaluation of women, homophobia, and wanton violence.” Kupers has been studying incarcerated masculinity for most of his career (his most recent book is Solitary), but in the ‘80’s he was involved in the pro-feminist men’s movement and realized he could integrate his knowledge of gender with his knowledge of prisons. Kupers found that Connell’s hegemonic masculinity, when applied to prisons, was in fact toxic masculinity — which is to say prison is toxic masculinity in its “pure form.” He points specifically to black men who are disproportionately (along with Hispanic men) incarcerated by America’s “justice” system. These are men for whom institutionalized racism has shut them off from “positive ways” of expressing masculinity — excelling at school or at work, for instance — causing them to resort to “negative ways” like crime. In prison the lack of authority is complete, so the toxicity is equally complete. “I don’t think it’s a matter of them being inclined to fight with each other and gain dominance; they’re not,” Kupers says. “Rather they’ve been deprived of all the more positive avenues to get ahead so they choose to maintain their manhood in the prison yard.”

What does this have to do with a bunch of white upper crust school boys? “My sense was that what we see in prison, the sort of tough guy on the yard kind of thing, where prisoners buff up and fight each other for dominance and where sexual assault is the ultimate humiliation,” Kupers explains, “my sense was that that’s not that different from what men do out in the world.”

* * *

“[Y]oung men use crime as a means of constructing the kind of stereotypic masculinity that helps them traverse their adolescence and win the acceptance of peers, as well as fathers, coaches, and other hypermasculine role models,” writes Kupers. This is where stealing a car, joining a gang, bragging about rape — or confronting a Native American, groping a girl, assaulting a boy — becomes a way of being a man. This is also where privileged white boys are divided from other boys. While the kids at Covington and St. Mike’s and Georgetown Prep are acting out in their adolescence, they have the opportunity to graduate to a more socially acceptable adulthood of building a career (a Supreme Court position, maybe?) and a family. Without the same opportunity, the boys who are not white, who are not privileged, sidestep from the school yard to the prison yard.

Without his friends around him, sitting in front of NBC interviewer Savannah Guthrie, Nick Sandmann, the Covington teen from the viral video, looks like he’s soiling himself. Unblinking, speaking in a slow monotone, he is the opposite of how he looked in the video — smug, shameless, full of power. He is emasculated, as ineffectual as Brett Kavanaugh’s red-faced temper tantrum as he testified after Christine Blasey Ford. Yet both have arrived: Sandmann’s voice in the media has drowned out that of Nathan Phillips, and Kavanaugh is comfortably installed in the Supreme Court. And St. Mike’s, though none of its students have spoken publicly, has reinstated a Varsity team in which police say members participated in the assaults. These young men have successfully used crime as a means of constructing the kind of stereotypic masculinity that helps them traverse their adolescence and win the acceptance of peers, as well as fathers, coaches, and other hypermasculine role models.

This is the reason Gillette’s latest ad shows, among other aggressive male behaviors, a group of boys chasing another, and asks, “Is this the best a man can get?” Men who thought the ad was portraying them — yikes — believed they were being made to feel toxic just for existing. They responded with the hashtag #gilletteboycott and dumped Gillette’s products en masse. A week after the ad went up, Toronto writer Audra Williams posted a vintage image of Kris Kristofferson comforting Sinead O’Connor on stage at Madison Square Garden in 1992. It was two weeks after she had ripped up a picture of the pope on Saturday Night Live to protest abuse in the Catholic Church, and the audience would not quiet down. Kristofferson had been tasked with removing the 25-year-old singer from the stage, but instead he held her until she was ready to perform. “The recent Gillette ad has started/furthered a lot of conversations about what alternatives to toxic masculinity look like,” Williams tweeted. “This is it.”

The recent Gillette ad has started/furthered a lot of conversations about what alternatives to toxic masculinity look like. This is it. pic.twitter.com/xATL9KUr9K

— Audra Williams (@audrawilliams) January 20, 2019

“There’s a very strong confrontation between the two ends of the spectrum right now and in it I think there’s the potential to form a new idea about masculinity,” says Kupers. On the right side there is the President and his hatred of the other, whether it be a woman or literally anyone else who is not like him. That is to say, the loudest voice in America “is giving permission to the most reactionary, the most racist, the most homophobic tendencies in people to be expressed.” On the left side, however, there are a growing number of others — women, women of color, LGBTQ people — in politics, there are campaigns like Gillette’s, there are fourth-wave feminists calling out oppression. So even though hatred may be freely expressed, it will no longer go without being challenged, and therein lies the option to change. “Masculinity is not a fixed entity embedded in the body or personality traits of individuals,” writes Connell. “Masculinities are configurations of practice that are accomplished in social action…” To paraphrase Kupers, they’re not bad kids, but it’s up to their parents, their role models, society as a whole, to ensure that they don’t grow up to be worse.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

‘What If We Just Got Out of Nature’s Way?’

For many, climate change is still a future problem to address, but it’s already affecting certain beachside communities. When water flooded Imperial Beach, California, in March 2014, it made a symbolic meeting with the city’s surfer statue — as if to tell residents, “What is now dry will soon be shoreline.”

For High Country News, Ruxandra Guidi details how this small beach community is directly confronting climate change by talking the impossible: managed retreat. As other coastal towns consider raising the land, building seawalls and levees, or using sand replenishment, Imperial Beach asks instead: “What if we just got out of nature’s way?”

Dedina does not see a future in sand. His city, he believes, will have to do what was once unthinkable: It will have to retreat. Managed retreat represents a planned move away from the coast, allowing the beach to erode for the forces of nature to take over. This, of course, is a gargantuan task. How does a city take all the homes and businesses along its coast and relocate them inland? It has never been done in the Western U.S. before, certainly not on the scale that would be needed — even for a city as small as Imperial Beach.

“This is all new to us,” Dedina said, as we chatted one day in his office. He showed me what a retreat looked like on a map: a ribbon of color, one to three city blocks deep, that covered Imperial Beach’s entire coast. “Cities are inherently very conservative places, but we decided that it would be unwise to be conservative in this situation,” he said. “Our only future lies in being innovative and taking risks, because the risk of not taking a risk is very great.”

Read the story

The Family Is Political

American Andrew met his future husband, Elad, in Israel. They married in Canada, and had twin boys — Aidan, and Ethan, one fathered by each man — with a surrogate. When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down Obergefell v. Hodges, they decided to move to California to be closer to Andrew’s family. It did not go as planned.

A few months after Ethan’s citizenship had been denied, the Dvash-Banks family landed in Los Angeles. Andrew and Aiden carried their US passports; Elad carried his Israeli passport and a green card. Ethan passed through US customs at LAX with a Canadian passport and a six-month tourist visa. What they would do next was anyone’s guess, but at the very least they were determined to live the life they had planned as an American family for as long as they could.

“Of all the hundreds and hundreds of things I worried about, this one never crossed my mind,” Andrew said of the ordeal. “How could it? They’re both my children. I’m on both birth certificates, Elad is on both birth certificates—exclusively. No one else appears on the birth certificates. I am the legal father. I am the father of both children. It never would have crossed my mind in a million years.”

Now, LGBTQ immigration rights organization Immigration Equality is bringing a lawsuit on their behalf, hoping to highlight the ways in which immigration law is not keeping up with reproductive technologies and changing definitions of family. Raj Telhan‘s story at VQR is a comprehensive, accessible dive into the history and future of U.S. immigration law, what makes a citizen, and what makes a family.

Immigration Equality also argues that the sections of the INA concerned with citizenship (as opposed to immigration), do not include specific definitions of the terms “parent,” “person,” “mother,” “father,” and “out of wedlock” that are being used by the State Department to impose a genetic threshold for parentage on married same-sex couples like Andrew and Elad. This last intriguing argument essentially amounts to a critique of the State Department’s reading of the statutory language of the INA. Tacitly, the complaint asks what we really mean by parent or mother or father. And more profoundly: What, precisely, is family? And this is where the precedent-setting power of the Dvash-Banks case stems from. Until recently, these definitions were taken for granted, their interpretations rooted in age-old understandings of hereditary bonds. With advances in assisted-reproductive technology, however, the supposedly reliable assumptions don’t always hold. The outcome of the Dvash-Banks family’s case will hinge, in part, on whether the courts acknowledge the biotechnological and social forces that have transfigured traditional definitions of family.

Read the story

True Crime and the Trash Balance

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2019 | 9 minutes (2,514 words)

In his satirical 1827 essay, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” Thomas de Quincey called himself a connoisseur of murder before ensuring us he hadn’t actually committed one himself. In her new book I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, late author Michelle McNamara also reassures us that her interest is personal, not prurient (it originated with an unsolved crime in her childhood neighborhood). Most of us have excuses for our interest in true crime, as though enjoying it offered real insight into our own predilections. The quasi-religious impulse to consider this a perversion of society’s innate morality has led to a flurry of theories about the source of our fascination, with four main hypotheses recurring: true crime can be a cathartic conduit for our primal urges, a source of schadenfreude, a controlled environment to experience the thrill of fear, and way to arm us (women particularly) with the knowledge to keep ourselves safe. A psychologist, speaking to NPR in 2009, provided the perfect précis: “our fascination with crime is equaled by our fear of crime. It’s two sides of the same story.”

True crime is less embarrassing, like so many things, when it’s scrubbed clean. On my shelf, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s News of a Kidnapping and Dave Cullen’s Columbine stick out for how unobtrusive they are amidst the loudly stylized spines of Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me and Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, among others. With their unadorned print (no drips) and minimalist art (no claret), these tasteful soft covers pass for literature. They are comparable to “prestige” podcasts like Serial and S-Town and series like Making a Murderer and The Keepers, Netflix shows in which the classic hallmarks of true crime programs — overly explicit, overly emotive — are massaged into character-driven narratives for the graduate set. In the midst of this influx of classy crime content, watching throwbacks like Lifetime’s Surviving R. Kelly, in which survivors are tasked with reliving their abuse and tear-stained grief is the closeup du jour, starts to feel like an ignominious act.

In 2016, at the beginning of the true crime renaissance, The New Yorker asked Popular Crime author Bill James whether, regardless of the highbrow livery, it was fundamentally “distasteful” (New Yorker for “trashy”) to transform tragedy into entertainment. “Well, certainly there is something distasteful about it,” James said, but, “When there is a car wreck, we ask what happened to cause the car wreck.” That is to say: The crime itself is distasteful (or trashy), therefore it’s necessarily distasteful (or trashy) when we address it. So, either we can refuse to interrogate crime, full stop, or we can ensure that the grief we cause is for a greater good. It is a sort of trash balance — less exploitation, more justice — with only one bad ending instead of two.

* * *

True crime was lurid straight out of the birth canal. Born in the mid-sixteenth century, it was the offspring of two relatively new developments: criminal justice and the printing press. Historic crime reports’ graphic nature is typically associated with a depravity believed to appeal to the unrefined, uneducated, and unmoneyed, but that was not the case with these early publications. Though they were often branded with explicit woodcuts that would have been understandable to even the illiterate, they also boasted rhyming text and only went to those who could afford them, predominantly the upper echelons. In “True Crime: The Origins of Modern Sensationalism,” published in The American Historical Review, Joy Wiltenburg writes that “emotive language, direct dialogue, building of suspense through circumstantial detail, and graphic description of bloody violence were common in the genre.”

Favored cases were in-family and usually involved multiple deaths. The focus was on the victims, while the moral of the story was that sin begat punishment. “The combination of truth with appeals to the heart underlined the religious focus of these works,” writes Wiltenburg. “Virtually all crime accounts published during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries connected their stories with an edifying Christian message.” This message associated brutality with the devil and positioned public order as the path to virtue. “[Sensationalism] has had religious, political, and cultural impact,” Wilternburg sums up, “promoting the ready acceptance of punitive government actions, the advancement of religious agendas, the internalization of mainstream emotional expectations, the habit of vicarious emotional experience, and the focus on distinctive individual identity.”

With a reputation for being insensitive to and financially exploiting both criminals and their victims, true crime is often accused of sensationalism, but that term wasn’t coined until the 19th century, a time that favored rational thought over the emotive prose of journalists. “While sexual scandals and other shocking events have become staples of modern sensationalism,” writes Wiltenburg, “its chief focus has always been crime, especially the most bloody and horrifying of murders.” The 1800s also gave us our first detectives, who inspired Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin stories and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, the latter not only centering crime fiction as a genre, but granting it a modicum of respectability. The gutter was still within spitting distance, though. Penny dreadfuls arrived — demon barber Sweeney Todd in tow — as early versions of popular culture in the form cheap mass-produced serials for young, increasingly literate working-class men, featuring salacious gore; like the true crime paperbacks of today, they supplied affordable, digestible scandal to entertain tired people with no time. The last gasp of the penny dreadful coincided with the precursor to O.J. Simpson’s so-called trial of the century: The Lizzie Borden case. The 32-year-old Massachusetts woman’s trial for the axe murder of her parents spawned a media phenomenon and firmly established the mass appeal of true crime. The next century saw the trash-fired genre shooting off in various directions, from tabloids like The National Enquirer to paperbacks like Lacey Fosburgh’s Closing Time to shows like America’s Most Wanted.

Then there was In Cold Blood.

“Until one morning in mid-November 1959, few Americans — in fact, few Kansans — had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.” Before In Cold Blood, this is not how real crime stories read. What Arthur Conan Doyle did for crime fiction, Truman Capote did for true crime. His 1965 experiment was released as a four-part serial in The New Yorker and became the reference point for every other high-brow true crime work in every other medium. “The motivating factor in my choice of material — that is, choosing to write a true account of an actual murder case — was altogether literary,” Capote told The New York Times. “It seemed to me that journalism, reportage, could be forced to yield a serious new art form: the ‘nonfiction novel,’ as I thought of it.” He believed only those with the “fictional technical equipment” — novelists, not journalists — like him could do it. The factual inaccuracies that have since emerged suggest that Capote’s belief in his own skills — he neither taped nor took notes during interviews — were as sensational as the genre he was hoping to reinvent. His book is still, however, considered the pinnacle of crime lit.

It was Capote’s book that the Times referred to when designating Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line a “nonfiction feature film,” per its distributors, in 1988. This exercise in lyrical fact was groundbreaking in its own right: an elegant piece of true crime as an advocacy tool. The subject of a false conviction, Randall Dale Adams had his case thrown out with the help of evidence Morris uncovered. It’s a straight shot from The Thin Blue Line to Serial, which blew up true crime podcasting in 2014. But while an appeal followed this program’s highly subjective long-form reexamination of Adnan Syed’s conviction for killing Baltimore teen Hae Min Lee in 1999, it was Capote — “a leap in narrative innovation on the scale of In Cold Blood” — who was once again cited, this time in The New Yorker. Serial’s executive producer has said they were trying to avoid an exploitative “Nancy Grace type of a titillating thing,” but the program was serialized with its own version of a cliffhanger each week, and provided its own hero, the avatar in our ears, reporter Sarah Koenig. Yet Koenig bristled at the suggestion by the Times’ Magazine that this was entertainment. “I don’t think that’s fair,” she said. “I’m still reporting.”

As though the two were mutually exclusive. As though true crime could only be trash if it were entertainment, and could only be entertainment if it weren’t journalism. Of course, this negates the nature of media. To entertain — to entertain a thought, for instance — is merely to take it into consideration, to allow it to hold one’s attention. Journalism is made to entertain; if it weren’t, reports would not be called “stories” and there would be no need for inverted triangles or kickers or pull quotes or anything else to catch our attention, to hold it. Because to deliver the news there has to be someone to deliver it to, and that necessitates their entertainment. Otherwise the news is nothing but fact; there is no story.

* * *

“Many of the differences between trash culture and high culture show only that storytelling adapts to changing economic, social and political conditions,” Richard Keller Simon writes in Trash Culture: Popular Culture and the Great Tradition. It’s something to consider when watching Lifetime’s Surviving R. Kelly. The series was produced by a network for women branded by its schlocky aesthetic and penchant for frothy romance. An exec at Lifetime has admitted it has “erred on the tabloid side” and Surviving R. Kelly, which has a number of black women recounting the decades of abuse they say the singer has inflicted on them, exhibits the familiar tropes: the inflated score, the voyeuristic set pieces, the abused women on display. In an interview with Complex earlier this month, showrunner dream hampton revealed that she received a number of notes from Lifetime and that she was pushed to find more victims. “I didn’t like the salaciousness of stacking up all of these people who survived him,” she said, “but I got the corroboration part.” The result is a series that orchestrates rescue attempts and highlights the explicitness of Kelly’s brutality, while only gesturing vaguely at the cottage industry he has fostered over the past three decades in order to victimize black women and at our collective failure to see these women as victims at all.

When I watched it, I couldn’t shake a feeling of ickiness, particularly when one of the victims was asked to describe her abuse and dissolved into tears. We didn’t need to see that scene from the pee tape so many times, we didn’t need a tour by one victim of the room where she was allegedly tortured, we didn’t need to watch as one mother reunited with her daughter. (I’m not even including the questionable stylistic choices). The whole endeavor read trashy, old-school Lifetime. “I saw someone kind of try to drag me about why isn’t this on something more premium like Netflix. But this to me is the perfect place for it,” hampton told Complex. “I know that women watch Lifetime, and that black women make up the majority of those viewers.” Reading this made me doubly uncomfortable. It suggested that to get black women’s attention you had to feed them trash. And, okay, maybe black women weren’t trying to mute R. Kelly over The Chicago Sun-Times’ original reporting, but none of us were! The world has changed since 2002, and all of us — including black women — have become more sophisticated about predation.

“The average American today has greater familiarity with the legal process, thanks in part to procedural dramas and the round-the-clock media coverage of splashy crimes that began with the O.J. Simpson trial in the 1990s,” writes Lenika Cruz in The Atlantic. “And people are more aware than ever of flaws in the criminal-justice system, including police brutality and wrongful convictions.” This means that true crime has had to hustle to keep up with its audience, reframing from the crime itself to seeking its closure. NPR noticed the new true crime formula in 2015, with programs like Serial and HBO’s The Jinx (and later Netflix’s Making a Murderer and APM’s In the Dark) concentrating on ongoing cases that could be affected by new reporting. Andrew Jarecki, director of The Jinx, called this subject matter “live ball,” and so here we are in the live-ball era of true crime in which Robert Durst literally burps up a confession on camera before he is charged with murder. “Can the genre sustain this? Can they really sustain true crime as an advocacy medium?” Michael Arntfield, founder of the Cold Case Society, asked The Pacific Standard. “The success and the legitimacy of the medium hinges on being able to stay within this framework of advocacy ahead of strictly sensationalism or profitability.”

But even advocacy has its limits. Netflix’s runaway success Making a Murder eschewed Serial-like narration and Jinx-like reenactments, but contorted almost 700 hours of footage into supporting a theory that the filmmakers had already formulated, that convicted murderer Steven Avery was innocent despite everything pointing to the contrary. Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos told the Times they secured interviews where others didn’t because of their “tempered approach.” Like those books on my shelf, this refined series passed for high culture.

The most balanced true crime isn’t actually true crime. Last year, American Public Media launched the second season of their hit podcast In the Dark, hosted by Madeleine Baran. Over 11 episodes, it examined the six trials of Curtis Flowers for the same murders. Even though the precipitating incident was the crime, the attention was on everything else; the reporting team embedded itself in Flowers’ Mississippi hometown for a year, ultimately producing not only a strong — dare I say entertaining? — sense of place, but a rigorous analysis of the systemic failures of the investigation. “For us as reporters, we’re here to look at the people in power and look at the systems in place that raise questions about whether or not the criminal justice system is fair, whether it is just using facts,” Baran told NPR. “So what that results in is not our place to say. But certainly, in this case, what we’ve shown is that the evidence against Curtis Flowers is weak. So this becomes a question now for the courts.” While other podcasts rely on their relatability, this one doesn’t have to — the story is enough. In the aftermath of Baran’s team’s exhaustive reporting, the Supreme Court has agreed to reconsider Flowers’ conviction. It is a rare case in which the balance seems to be moot. It’s all justice.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Theatre of Wokeness