Public intellectual and Stanford neuroscientist Sam Harris said that if the Covid Pandemic was a dress rehearsal for an even more fatal pandemic, we as a society failed.
We failed because we didn’t come together during a time we needed to. The Pandemic became a wedge between the Red and the Blue parties and compounded preexisting political polarization.
The Big Three: Masks, Vaccines, and Lockdowns: Chimera of Government Intrusion and Overreach
On the Right, masks, vaccines, and lockdowns were seen as intrusions by Big Government, AKA “A Liberal Plot,” AKA “A Communist Plot,” AKA “Satan Himself.”
On the Left, vaccines were seen as dangerous substances that conflicted with highly educated left-leaning people’s embrace of alternative medicine and organic living.
Social Influencers Have More Power Than Legacy Media
Both the Right and the Left now live in a new Information Ecosystem where cultural influencers Joe Rogan and Adam Carolla have more podcast listeners than CNN and MSNBC have viewers and New York Times readers combined.
Both Joe Rogan and Adam Carolla are hard to pin down politically because they are complicated individuals but they do invite conspiracy theorists on their shows, they do have hostility toward big government, they do tend to be libertarian in wanting minimum government, and their views tend to be embraced by anti-government players in social media who weaponize their information to push their own agendas.
“News” can travel light-speed on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook faster than all the “legacy media” combined.
We no longer believe in our media sources, we no longer believe in our government institutions, and we no longer even live in the same reality. We have what is called an epistemic crisis, which means we can’t even agree on how to determine what is knowledge and what is real.
Vaccine Compliance
To beat the Pandemic, we needed vaccine compliance, but red zones were huge non-compliance zones. This doesn’t bode well for future pandemics when viruses may be more fatal.
We failed to address the Covid Pandemic appropriately because we saw a breakdown of trust in our public institutions.
If we can’t trust government institutions during times of crisis when we have to comply with life-and-death safety measures, we as a society are done.
The polarization of the Covid Pandemic may be a precursor to our extinction.
Social Media-Fueled Conspiracies Radicalize a Huge Percentage of the Population
The same conspiracy-soaked brains that reject all government information about Covid as a lie are the same brains that see free elections as a lie and are the same brains that believe Nancy Pelosi and her minions stole the 2020 election.
Once your brain gets hijacked with one conspiracy theory, it opens the gates to getting hijacked by hundreds more.
It may be impossible to live in a free and democratic society if a significant portion of it is radicalized by fake conspiracies because in part it is extremely difficult to persuade the radicalized to let go of their conspiracies. Their brains have been hijacked.
How to un-hijack their brains is one of the greatest questions of our time.
To Wear a Mask Or Not: Shaming Doesn’t Work
In this environment, wearing a mask, or not wearing a mask, becomes a signal to not only your political beliefs but your tribal affiliation.
Shaming and ridiculing non-maskers who have been featured in viral videos has not helped persuade non-maskers to wear masks. It has only helped to deepen the political polarization.
The Social Media Outrage Machine feeds our addiction to being angry all the time, but it doesn't bring society together; it merely tears us apart.
In a way, outrage is a chimera. It makes us feel like a tool for social justice, but in fact, we are merely preaching to the converted and enraging those who live outside our tribe.
The Appeal of Conspiracies
People more and more have not been doing deep dives into credible news. Rather, they are enjoying “entertainment news,” which imitates the dramatic conspiracy stories from Hollywood movies.
Conspiracy believers feel a loss of control in a stressful world, and believing in a conspiracy makes them feel like they are in control and not one of the “sheeple” being manipulated by big government.
Conspiracy believers rely on a childish narrative about the world: It can be a world of closure, certainty, and control if we have a conspiracy theory to frame the world in such a way. In fact, the world is chaotic, illogical, and uncertain. Adults can embrace the uncertainty of the world. Emotionally-stunted narcissists can not.
Conspiracy believers love believing that they have knowledge of a “secret reality” that the sheeple are too blind to see and this belief makes them feel special, suggesting that conspiracies appeal to narcissism, a form of psychological maladaptation.
Social media weaponized misinformation and scales it so that what was once fringe has the appearance of being mainstream and gives conspiracy believers a sense of being normal because they enjoy power in numbers. In reality, they live in a fever swamp of insane beliefs.
***
Fallacies That Misinform Anti-Vaxxers
Additives are toxic when in fact the amount of toxins is less than what you consume in water every day.
I lead a natural lifestyle, so I am building my immunity when in fact only the vaccine will increase your immunity in a significant way.
Vaccines lead to allergies.
Big government is exaggerating the danger of disease.
Vaccines lead to autism.
As a free person, I should have a choice since my choice affects me and me alone.
Big Pharma is making billions from this corrupt business.
***
Some Conspiracies Are Legit
To add to the confusion, there are real conspiracies in this world. For example, the medical device industry in the United States is corrupt and led by profits over safety. This corruption has been well documented in the Netflix documentary The Bleeding Edge. But just because you can find credible evidence for one conspiracy doesn't mean that all conspiracies are credible.
Failures of Media to Promote Truth in Vaccines
Bothsideism, providing both sides to create what appears to be a balanced view when in fact, a conspiracy gets a lopsided advantage.
The media peddles fake controversies because sensationalism gets high ratings. We can call this entertainment news.
Anecdotes carry as much weight as legit studies to an audience that gives as much credence to anecdotes as they do to real data.
Fringe news and fringe conspiracy believers go on high-profile shows like Oprah and other media stars.
***
Sample Thesis Statements for Chimera of Conspiracies
In an age of the Covid Pandemic, we find that a significant population has been brain-hijacked by the anti-vax chimera because of a distrust in institutions, political polarization, the rise of “expert” influencers over true experts, and narcissistic personality types that crave conspiracies.
The appeal of anti-vax conspiracies is a case study of the breakdown of ethos, pathos, and logos.
Anti-vax conspiracists live in a self-feeding fever swamp defined by weaponized misinformation, political polarization, and logical fallacies that defy reason and the powers of persuasion.
A conspiracy chimera such as anti-vax propaganda hijacks the brain in such a way that the person stubbornly resists even the clearest presentation of ethos, pathos, and logos to support the efficacy of vaccines.
Sample Outline:
Paragraph 1: Define a chimera in the context of conspiracies.
Paragraph 2: Present your thesis or claim.
Paragraphs 3-7: Your supporting paragraphs
Paragraph 8: Your conclusion, a powerful restatement of your thesis.
Your final page, Works Cited, in MLA format with 4 sources.
This is a compelling work that relates to essay assignment on Anti-Vaxxers.
Sample Outlines for Anti-Vaxxer Topic
Outline #1
Paragraph 1, Introduce the crisis of the resurgence of diseases we thought we had conquered like measles. Or describe the growing fear between vaccines and autism.
Paragraph 2, transition to a thesis that argues the breakdown of sanity that informs the Anti-Vaxxer movement.
Paragraphs 3-6 should analyze 4 major causes of the bipartisan tribalism and anti-science that informs the Anti-Vaxxer movement.
Paragraphs 7 and 8 should be counterargument-rebuttal paragraphs.
Paragraph 9, your conclusion is a powerful restatement of your thesis.
Outline #2
Paragraph 1: Introduce the crisis of resurgence of diseases we thought we had conquered like measles. Or describe the growing fear between vaccines and autism.
Paragraphs 3-6 should be your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraphs 7 and 8 should be your counterargument-rebuttal paragraphs.
Paragraph 9: Conclusion is a powerful restatement of your thesis.
Causes of Resurgence of Measles
According to Peter Beinart, there are several causes of this resurgence:
One. Lack of historical memory. Many don't know how horrible it was to suffer outbreak of measles, polio, and other diseases.
Two. Many people have "over confidence in their own amateur knowledge," and at the same time, these same people disdain expertise.
Three. American spirit of "autonomy and personal choice" confuses many who think that ignoring science is a way of asserting their freedom and individuality.
Four. Many have diminished trust in government, which is looked upon as a conspiratorial hornet's nest to be held in contempt.
Five. Many have diminished trust in media. Conservatives say the media is "owned by the libs." Liberals say the media is owned by giant conglomerates and "Big Pharma."
Six. There is rising faith in alternative medicine. One visible example is Steve Jobs who after getting cancer consulted alternative therapies and only pursued mainstream medical attention when it was too late.
Seven. There is confusion between causation and correlation when it comes to autism. Most people are diagnosed with autism at two to three years of age, the time when people get vaccinated, so many parents confuse the vaccinations with being the cause of the autism when it is really a correlative connection, but anecdotal testimony creates overwhelming fear so that parents make fear-based decisions rather than science-based ones.
Eight. Social media spreads fake Intel that becomes people's reality. For example, there is thimerosal scare. Thimerosal is a preservative in vaccines.
Nine. Many Europeans share the same mindset described above, so that international travel between the States and Europe is spreading measles.
Sample Outlines for Anti-Vaxxer Topic
Outline #1
Paragraph 1, Introduce the crisis of resurgence of diseases we thought we had conquered like measles. Or describe the growing fear between vaccines and autism.
Paragraph 2, transition to a thesis that argues the breakdown of sanity that informs the Anti-Vaxxer movement.
Paragraphs 3-6 should analyze 4 major causes of the bipartisan tribalism and anti-science that informs the Anti-Vaxxer movement.
Paragraphs 7 and 8 should be counterargument-rebuttal paragraphs.
Paragraph 9, your conclusion is a powerful restatement of your thesis.
Outline #2
Paragraph 1: Introduce the crisis of resurgence of diseases we thought we had conquered like measles. Or describe the growing fear between vaccines and autism.
I find it painful to be so critical of Derek Thompson’s essay “The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable.” I’m an admirer of Thompson, and I find his powers of analysis to be remarkable, his essays to be insightful, and even his Workism essay to have many truthful observations in it, especially as his essay pertains to fraudsters like Elizabeth Holmes and Adam Neumann.
However, I have found many deceptions and fallacies in his Workism essay, which I have already pointed out.
To add to my criticism of Thompson’s Workism essay, I would like to refer you to a YouTube channel called Wisecrack. One of the videos, “Hustle Culture: Why We Can’t Stop Working,” not only gives us a more relevant and accurate analysis of job burnout but makes many of Thompson’s observations seem even more unoriginal and erroneous.
To begin, being overworked and burned out is nothing new. The narrator of “Hustle Culture” observes that hustle culture started in the Industrial Revolution with the advent of electricity when the lights were on all the time.
Poor people were told in the 1800s to “bootstrap” their way out of poverty. “Bootstrapping” originally meant to do the impossible: To jump over a fence while holding one’s ankles, but over time “bootstrapping” evolved into something positive: self-reliance and determination, virtues to mask the exploitation of the poor.
So Workism is just a morphed version of bootstrapping. Thompson is appropriating an old concept and making a new term to give relevance and novelty to his essay.
The Wisecrack narrator goes on to say that people of color and marginalized groups have been oppressed by bootstrapping since early American history, long before the tech start-ups Thompson mentions in his essay.
In fact, it is people of color who termed “hustle culture,” which white people have appropriated to be a good thing.
However, the Wisecrack narrator emphasizes that hustle culture is not a good thing. Hustle culture refers to an exploited group of people being forced to hustle simply to survive.
Survival of the poor and the exploited toiling under conditions of systemic injustice is the real Mother of Workism, not the quest for religious meaning, as Thompson falsely claims.
The racism that informs bootstrapping and hustle culture is abundantly evident when the Wisecrack narrator points out that an 1800s white doctor George Beard was worried that overworked white people were suffering from neurasthenia or “American-itis,” the condition of job burnout and mental fatigue, and he recommended that white people get more rest.
However, this white doctor made no such recommendations for people of color because this white doctor falsely claimed that non-white people were made to be overworked and that their limited brain power was such that they could not suffer “overworked minds.”
So let us pause and make it clear that bootstrapping and hustle culture was uniquely exacted against people of color and then the terms were appropriated by white people to make bootstrapping and hustle culture sound like positive traits like “self-reliance” and “determination” when in fact they were about racism and exploitation. Derek Thompson would have been well served to put his Workism idea in this context, but he did not do so.
The Wisecrack narrator goes on to observe that over the last 40 years American workers of all races have suffered from declining unions, wage stagnation, and economic necessity to survive through hustle culture. They are overworked to pay bills. They are not seeking religious meaning, the core focus of Thompson’s essay.
When the Wisecrack narrator discusses people who are spending long hours in the tech industry, he doesn’t make the claim, like Derek Thompson, that they are enticed by religious meaning. Rather, the narrator correctly observes that tech workers spend long hours at work because their bosses demand it and they are enticed with lavish perks.
Concluding Remarks:
The Wisecrack narrator points out so many accurate insights about Hustle Culture that contradict Derek Thompson’s essay:
Systemic injustice and racism are the Mother of Workism, not the quest for religious meaning.
Long before white people appropriated Hustle Culture from black people to brag about their work ethic, black people were hustling just to survive.
Perks and pressure from bosses in tech companies, not the quest for religious meaning, forces tech workers to work long hours.
A Study of “Why Are People Pretending to Love Work?” by Erin Griffith
Performative Workaholism Becomes a Lifestyle
"How can I manipulate my workers?"
Imagine being the owner of a company such as WeWork and your underlying sentiment toward your workers is this: “Everyone of them is a wet dishrag and I want to squeeze out the last drop of every one of them until they’re dry and brittle to the point of death. But I’ll make them complicit in their own demise. I’ll make them actually virtue-signal their way to their own exploitation.”
How could someone do this? This seems to be one of the more salient questions in Erin Griffith’s essay “Why Are People Pretending to Love Work?”
Griffith observes that we now live in something called Hustle Culture in which the highest virtue is working yourself to the bone and chronicling your self-exploitation on Instagram as if it’s a good thing.
So we have these forces causing job burnout:
Ubermensch ethic (being a Superman)
Virtue signaling “your journey” on social media to show your “work rapture”
Toxic positivity
Groupthink
Pseudo-spirituality
In fact, today’s young employees want to curate their lives as being in a constant state of “work rapture.”
We will notice that these “super employees” use several cliches to reveal the toxic positivity that fuels their work.
As Griffith writes:
“The current state of entrepreneurship is bigger than career,” reads the One37pm“About Us” page. “It’s ambition, grit and hustle. It’s a live performance that lights up your creativity … a sweat session that sends your endorphins coursing ... a visionary who expands your way of thinking.” From this point of view, not only does one never stop hustling — one never exits a kind of work rapture, in which the chief purpose of exercising or attending a concert is to get inspiration that leads back to the desk.
Ryan Harwood, the chief executive of One37pm’s parent company, told me that the site’s content is aimed at a younger generation of people who are seeking permission to follow their dreams. “They want to know how to own their moment, at any given moment,” he said.
“Owning one’s moment” is a clever way to rebrand “surviving the rat race.” In the new work culture, enduring or even merely liking one’s job is not enough. Workers should love what they do, and then promote that love on social media, thus fusing their identities to that of their employers. Why else would LinkedInbuild its own version of Snapchat Stories?
***
Hustle Culture is rooted in both the ideology that your work is your Higher Purpose and that you are supposed to be in a constant state of elevated endorphins, a rapturous bliss of never-ending work and exercise. Even your leisure activities become ways of taking the experience and applying it to your work. Your job subsumes everything into it because your job is the apotheosis--the highest point--of your existence.
There is also a certain vaingloriousness and “look at me” to Hustle Culture. You show yourself hard at work in the office, perhaps giving a PowerPoint presentation, running on a gym treadmill, or going through a grueling Peloton workout--and all of these activities are recorded on video for your Instagram.
Make the Sheeple Work for You So You Can Work Less
When work’s octopus tentacles reach into the very core of people’s private lives--their dreams, their aspirations, their most intimate relationships--then there is no life-work balance, there is no private space, there is no life outside of work. The employee has given up their boundaries in order to be both a “team player” and someone who self-deceptively believes they are achieving their dream. Meanwhile, their boss is squeezing every last drop out of them without appropriate recompense.
What the sheeple don’t realize is that their bosses work less even as they champion Hustle Culture to their employees. This is part of the Hustle Culture scam. As we read:
“The vast majority of people beating the drums of hustle-mania are not the people doing the actual work. They’re the managers, financiers and owners,” said David Heinemeier Hansson, the co-founder of Basecamp, a software company. We spoke in October, as he was promoting his new book, “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work,” about creating healthy company cultures.
Mr. Heinemeier Hansson said that despite data showing long hours improve neither productivity nor creativity, myths about overwork persist because they justify the extreme wealth created for a small group of elite techies. “It’s grim and exploitative,” he said.
Elon Musk, who stands toreap stock compensation upward of $50 billion if his company, Tesla, meets certain performance levels, is a prime example of extolling work by the many that will primarily benefit him. Hetweeted in November that there are easier places to work than Tesla, “but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.” The correct number of hours “varies per person,” he continued, but is “about 80 sustained, peaking about 100 at times. Pain level increases exponentially above 80.”
Mr. Musk, who has more than 24 million Twitter followers, further noted that if you love what you do, “it (mostly) doesn’t feel like work.” Even he had to soften the lie of T.G.I.M. with a parenthetical.
***
Hustle Culture Started During the Early Days of Google
We read that Hustle Culture started in the early 2000s during the start of Google and other flourishing tech industries. The CEOs realized that creating Hustle Culture meant they could get more hours from their workers and even get them to bring coffee, breakfast, and lunch to the office. Doing gopher work became part of the desirable Hustle Culture. This trend has now spread to other industries and has become part of the mainstream. What’s insidious about this trend is that the upper management gets all the profits. Wage growth for workers has been stagnant over the last four decades.
The Pseudo-Religious Aura Around Work
Like Caroline Chen, Griffith posits that a decline in religion has created a spiritual vacuum that people are trying to fill by injecting meaning into their jobs. As she writes:
Perhaps we’ve all gotten a little hungry for meaning. Participation in organized religionis falling, especially among American millennials. In San Francisco, where I live, I’ve noticed that the concept of productivity has taken on an almost spiritual dimension. Techies here have internalized the idea — rooted in the Protestant work ethic — that work is not something you do to get what you want; the work itself is all. Therefore any life hack or company perk that optimizes their day, allowing them to fit in even more work, is not just desirable but inherently good.
Aidan Harper, who created a European workweek-shrinkage campaign called4 Day Week, argues that this is dehumanizing and toxic. “It creates the assumption that the only value we have as human beings is our productivity capability — our ability to work, rather than our humanity,” he told me.
It’s cultist, Mr. Harper added, to convince workers to buy into their own exploitation with a change-the-world message. “It’s creating the idea that Elon Musk is your high priest,” he said. “You’re going into your church every day and worshiping at the altar of work.”
***
If you surrender to the idea that work is your core source of meaning, you have no value of self or dignity outside of your job. This is a toxic relationship between you and your boss. You are now dependent on the job for meaning, belonging, and self-worth. You have no life outside of the job. You don’t even have an identity. This makes you vulnerable to depression and exploitation. You need to face the reality that going to work is “not going to church.”
Inevitable Burnout
If you join Hustle Culture, eventually you will crash and burn. Hustle Culture simply is not sustainable. Not that your boss cares. He or she will throw you away like an empty soup can and replace you with a new can of soup.
Griffith points out that a lot of this burnout is a result of inflated expectations from graduating college with overwhelming student debt and believing that a job must be glorious to have suffered so much financially, but in truth, every jog is full of drudgery. As Griffith writes:
The logical endpoint of excessively avid work, of course, is burnout. That is the subject of a recent viralessay by the BuzzFeed cultural critic Anne Helen Petersen, which thoughtfully addresses one of the incongruities of hustle-mania in the young. Namely: If Millennials are supposedly lazy and entitled, how can they also be obsessed with killing it at their jobs?
Millennials, Ms. Petersen argues, are just desperately striving to meet their own high expectations. An entire generation was raised to expect that good grades and extracurricular overachievement would reward them with fulfilling jobs that feed their passions. Instead, they wound up with precarious, meaningless work and a mountain of student loan debt. And so posing as a rise-and-grinder, lusty for Monday mornings, starts to make sense as a defense mechanism.
Most jobs — even most good jobs! — are full ofpointless drudgery. Most corporations let us down in some way. And yet years after the HBO satire “Silicon Valley” made the vacuous mission statement “making the world a better place” a recurring punch line, many companies still cheerlead the virtues of work with high-minded messaging. For example, Spotify, a company that lets you listen to music, says that its mission is “to unlock the potential of human creativity.” Dropbox, which lets you upload files and stuff, says its purpose is “to unleash the world’s creative energy by designing a more enlightened way of working.”
David Spencer, a professor of economics at Leeds University Business School, says that such posturing by companies, economists and politicians dates at least to the rise of mercantilism in 16th-century Europe. “There has been an ongoing struggle by employers to venerate work in ways that distract from its unappealing features,” he said. But such propaganda can backfire. In 17th-century England, work was lauded as a cure for vice, Mr. Spencer said, but the unrewarding truth just drove workers to drink more.
***
Backlash
Griffith observes that the tech industry is losing its angelic halo and becoming a target of scorn. Much of its mining of private data, spreading weaponized misinformation to threaten democracies around the world, and doing these perfidious activities for profit is exposing tech industries for what they really are: not sanctuaries for meaning but ruthless money grabbers. As we read:
Internet companies may have miscalculated in encouraging employees to equate their work with their intrinsic value as human beings. After a long era of basking in positive esteem, the tech industry is experiencing a backlash both broad and fierce, on subjects from monopolistic behavior to spreading disinformation and inciting racial violence. And workers are discovering how much power they wield. In November, some 20,000 Googlers participated in a walkout protesting the company’shandling of sexual abusers. Other company employees shut down an artificial intelligence contract with the Pentagon that could have helped military drones become more lethal.
Mr. Heinemeier Hansson cited the employee protests as evidence that millennial workers would eventually revolt against the culture of overwork. “People aren’t going to stand for this,” he said, using an expletive, “or buy the propaganda that eternal bliss lies at monitoring your own bathroom breaks.” He was referring to aninterview that the former chief executive of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, gave in 2016, in which she said that working 130 hours a week was possible “if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom.”
***
Meaning on a Silver Platter
In some ways, it’s more difficult to exercise your independence and critical thinking and create a life for yourself, one that doesn’t require self-curation on Instagram or the validation of your co-workers. In some ways, it’s easier in the short run to be a sheeple who gets exploited at work and pretends to be happily part of Hustle Culture, but in the long term, this phony existence will cause you to crash. You’re better off leaving Hustle Culture sooner than later.
Review:
Defining a thesis:
A thesis is a meaningful claim or argument that is the central focus of your essay, that you can defend with credible information, that will outline an essay of 1,200 words or more, that is challenging enough to be appropriate for college-level writing, that has high stakes, and that defies simple analysis.
The thesis or claim is the central focus of your essay. It is the reason you are writing your essay. To stray from your thesis is to betray your original intention.
The thesis is based on an informed opinion based on credible research. Your research has been peer reviewed and is rooted in reality. To look to “research” based on a fever swamp of unproven conspiracies and misinformation is to present an essay that is disconnected from reality. We live in an age where even facts and reality itself are disputed. This is a very specific crisis called the epistemic crisis. You can read about this crisis in Jonathan Rauch’s book The Constitution of Knowledge.
A strong thesis may have reasons contained in the sentence. These reasons are also called mapping components. They outline your essay’s body paragraphs. Observe the following example: Working from the home is more viable for most companies because working from the home saves your workers from commute time, doesn’t expose workers to illnesses resulting in lost work time, reduces work theft opportunities, reduces company expenses such as heat, AC, lighting, etc., and takes advantage of the technology that’s cheaply available to make your employees’ home office an efficient business office.
The thesis can generate an essay that is 1,200 words or more means the thesis is demonstrable: You can defend the thesis with reasoning, logic, examples, and research.
Your thesis has high stakes. You present an argument and the listener or reader doesn’t feel compelled to say “So what?” Rather, you have chosen a topic that is relevant, vital, and urgent to the human condition.
Your thesis defies simple analysis. You are avoiding the obvious and factual such as “What the world needs now is love.” Rather, you are focusing on debatable topics.
Sample Thesis Statements
Sample #1
Workism is a social disease.
Sample #2
There are many causes behind the social plague of Workism.
Sample #3
The foundations of Workism--origin stories, Groupthink, toxic positivity, a sense of work mission and purpose, and the Ubermensch ethic--are based on a fraud designed to exploit employees.
Sample #4
Workism is the natural byproduct of immersing yourself in a job that gives you purpose and turns you into the kind of Ubermensch you hunger to be. In other words, McMahon’s essay assignment, which castigates meaning, higher purpose, and Ubermensch-driven work drive, will result in apathy and mediocrity at the workplace.
Sample #5
Contrary to the way McMahon has framed Workism for his English 1C writing assignment, Workism is a desirable ideal based on meaning, higher purpose, and a strong work ethic.
Sample #6
Workism is one of those gussied-up fabrications whipped up by social justice warriors and work-hungry journalists to hide the fact that it isn’t Workism that drives most American workers; it’s the hyper-competitive capitalist system, which makes survival in the workplace a zero-sum game.
Sample #7
While most American workers are too busy trying to survive in the workplace to indulge in this thing called Workism, there are rich techno-brats who hide behind Workism as a tool to exploit their workers, conjure fake meaning to the masses, and to give themselves a fake halo of “spreading goodness around the world.”
Sample #8
Workism is one of the most cunning and insidious methods for exploiting masses of young workers who hunger for belonging, meaning, and a framework to give incentive to their need to outwork their competition.
Sample #9
Workism is just another name for the workaholic that has plagued society since the Industrial Revolution. There’s nothing to see here but a few journalists trying to make online magazine click bait.
Sample #10
To lump together all workaholics with the devotees of modern-day Workism and make the claim that all work addiction is the same and therefore poo-pooh the very notion of Workism is to be blind to the very specific and distinctive type of employer manipulation used by today’s fraudsters, and this blindness does a great disservice to the modern-day workforce.
Sample #11
I stand by my claim that workaholics throughout the last one hundred years are the same as the devotees to modern-day Workism and that McMahon’s assignment is complete BS because the pseudo-spiritual underpinnings of the business world have always been with us. Long before the social media age and the era of the smarmy, unctuous Tech Bros, we’ve had the gospel of quasi-spirituality inspiring overwork and making “the job” the apotheosis of human existence. Look, for example, at the 1952 Norman Vincent Peale book The Power of Positive Thinking, the 1982 Thomas Peters book In Search of Excellence, and the 1989 Stephen Covey book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and you will see that decades before the Tech Bros hit the scene and the term Workism was bandied about, there was already a canon of “Holy Business Book” texts telling Americans they couldn’t be successful in business unless they fused their spiritual character with their workplace personality as a way of rationalizing their worship of blind ambition and working themselves to death. So, McMahon, I don’t care about the writers Derek Thompson and Helen Anne Petersen who would have us believe that Workism is “a thing” when in fact it’s just lipstick on the pig of workaholism. Come on, McMahon, gives us a real assignment.
Sample #12
When we look at the type of grift performed by fraudsters Elizabeth Holmes and Adam Neumann, we see that Workism is a very specific type of worker exploitation that owes its effectiveness to the social media tech age. Therefore, McMahon’s assignment is legit.
Essay is worth 200 points and due as an upload on November 19.
In essay 3, you are comparing two works that address similar qualities of a chimera.
What is a chimera?
A chimera is an obsession or a brain hijack in which people pursue a false idea or a false principle that they think will make them happy, whole, and complete when in fact the chimera is a false substitute for what they need: real change of their inner character. Rather than work on building their character and virtue, they follow a chimera. For example, a guy with low self-worth thinks he can become a "somebody" by going to UCLA and buying a Tesla, but UCLA and Tesla are merely cheap substitutes for what the guy really needs, self-confidence. The examples I gave are somewhat trite and basic, but they clarify the notion of the chimera.
To understand the chimera in more detail, here are some of its distinguishing characteristics:
The chimera gets deep inside our heads and becomes an obsession.
The chimera has a drug-like effect on us, intoxicating us and making us forget the real world.
The chimera is addictive. We will use other people to get our fix, so to speak.
The chimera never delivers, so we’re always disappointed. In this regard, riding a chimera is a hellish bipolar trip with high highs and low lows.
The chimera often becomes a substitute for basic human needs we have that aren’t being met such as power, love, belonging, purpose, meaning, creative distinction, success. In the case of Howard Ratner, he suffers from wounded masculinity and he seeks power in the black opal.
The more the chimera grows inside us, the more unhinged from reality we become.
The Assignment
Choose one of the following "Chimera Pairs" and write a comparison essay in which you analyze the causes and effects of the chimeras revealed in the stories, movies, or documentaries:
Comparison One: In “Winter Dreams” and Homecoming King, Dexter and Hasan go on a futile quest for the Great White Princess as a way of achieving status and belonging. The Great White Princess is a racial myth or chimera that Dexter and Hasan pursue in the hopes of achieving status, belonging, and self-worth.
Comparison Two: In White Hot and Good Hair, the documentaries address how cultural and racial ideals brainwash people into conforming to the “perfect look.” The white aesthetic becomes an obsession that reveals much about the racial mythology, hierarchy, and beauty standards that inform American culture.
Comparison Three: In Fake Famous and LuLaRich, the enticement of the easy life--Hakuna Matata--and celebrification impede people from living a real, authentic life.
Comparison Four: In Uncut Gems and Private Life, a black opal and the promise of a baby serve as a chimera for happiness, fulfillment, self-control, and status even as the characters’ lives unravel into more and more self-loathing and chaos.
Comparison Five: The Millennial Lifestyle Dream: consumerism and working from home: Read Derek Thompson’s “How a Recession Could Weaken the Work-From-Home Revolution” and “The End of the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy.” The chimera of the cool urban life in the digital age in which employees enjoy working from home, using Uber, and receiving gourmet home-cooking meals like Blue Apron seems to be more of a chimera or a fantasy in the face of the economic realities they face in a recession and a volatile stock market. Also see the YouTube video “Why Bosses Won’t Let Offices Die.”
In paragraph 1, your introduction, define the chimera and give a salient personal example.
In paragraph 2, your thesis, develop a comparison thesis that shows 4 common points between the two works you're analyzing.
Here are a couple of examples of comparative thesis statements:
Example #1:
The protagonists in Uncut Gems, Howard Ratner, and Private Life, Rachel and Richard, seek wholeness through a gemstone and a baby respectively when in fact their chimera quest reveals their emotional impoverishment, which entails a lack of self-worth, a sense of a squandered life, an addiction to "the hunt" rather than enjoying the present, and the sickness of comparing their achievements to others.
Example #2:
Whereas Dexter Green's pursuit of The Great White Princess results in the squandering of his entire existence on a cipher and a chimera so that his whole life is that of a lost soul floundering in a private hell, Hasan Minhaj's similar quest ends in time for him to be reborn out of the ashes of his grotesque obsession and move forward with post-chimera wisdom.
In paragraphs 3-6, support your points.
Paragraph 7, your conclusion, is a dramatic restatement of your thesis.
Your last page, your Works Cited, is in MLA format and has 4 sources.
Further Explanation of the Chimera:
Let us look at 15 characteristics:
A chimera is a seductive mirage that gets inside our head and feels so real to us that we love it more than life itself.
As we pursue this chimera with greater and greater intensity, we at the same time reject the people around us. In this regard, we are like drug addicts who prefer our drug to people.
A chimera is never real. It is always a mythical creature that fills our minds, yet it becomes for the person harboring the chimera the Ultimate Reality that casts all other considerations aside.
Sometimes we can be afflicted with a chimera and know it, want to be cured of it, but feel helpless to do anything about it. In this regard, we are dealing with the realm of an incurable obsession.
As our obsession with the chimera progresses, we deteriorate: We retreat into solipsism. For a short definition of solipsism, let us say we are afflicted with solipsism when the delusions of our imaginary self cut us off from reality.
When our brains are hijacked by a chimera, we follow an addiction cycle as acute as any narcotics addict in which we have highs and lows, ascents and crashes, a sort of bipolar life journey.
Some people pursue the chimera with no self-awareness, what is sometimes called metacognition. An absence of self-awareness or metacognition makes free will or free agency impossible.
Sometimes a chimera hijacks our brains without warning. It’s an unexpected obsession that hijacks the brains of even productive, sane human beings.
The chimera is often a substitute for some unfulfilled basic human need like love, companionship, meaning, connection, belonging, maturity, independence, freedom, creativity, etc. A chimera is always a cheap substitute for the real thing. For example, the excitement some people have when they attend a YouTube Mukbang is the substitute for human connection, belonging, and intimacy which is painfully lacking in their lives.
As the chimera grows over time, the person’s original sense of self fragments, decomposes, and becomes smaller and smaller as a new persona grows, typically an angry persona that resents not getting what he or she wants.
When people do acquire a chimera, they find they are not only disappointed but confused because the actuality of the acquisition pales compared to the obsession-fantasy of their imagination.
Often people replace one chimera with another, over and over as their lives are defined by cycles of self-destruction without any self-awareness. The motivation for constantly seeking a chimera is probably an empty life, a life without meaning, or what Viktor Frankl calls in his book Man’s Search for Meaning “the existential vacuum.” The chimera is a feeble attempt to fill that vacuum.
The chimera is an inflamed passion that grows like a weed inside our brains and strangles our powers of reason. The endgame of a chimera is insanity.
Some people are freed from the bondage of their chimera only after long-term excruciating suffering that creates a crisis of such intensity that these people are forced to exorcise the chimera demon from their brain and start their lives from scratch and create a sound foundation that won’t allow for the invasions of subsequent chimeras.
Many people live disconnected from reality and navigate their lives inside a hall of many mirror-like chimeras, which define their existence as a perpetual illusion and somehow they muster a facade of being productive members of society even as their souls rot deep inside.
White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie and Fitch
In this 88-minute Alison Klayman documentary, we see that CEO Mike Jeffries and his lieutenants impose a sort of white aesthetic on the employees and cultivate an “All-American Classic” or WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) old money look combined with chiseled abs to make “the rich white look” part of an exclusive club that all consumers should aspire to.
The “preppy all-American look” is code for white. And we’re not talking just any white, but a particular kind of white: old money upper class white.
“All-American Classic” or The Rich White Club
The White Rich Club mentality informed company practices. They put idealized white people in the front of the store and people of color in the back. Work hours, promotions, and visibility were all race-based with “All-American Classic,” that is, white, being the company ideal, not just for the employees but as the actual marketing tool: consumers who buy Abercrombie and Fitch are gaining acceptance into an exclusive all-white country club.
Of course, admittance into some kind of White Club is complete BS, but that’s the point. It’s a chimera.
Colorism
Advertising leverages chimeras, and in this case, the chimera is based on aesthetics, race, and colorism.
What is colorism? Colorism is discrimination within the same racial group based on skin color, looks, and aesthetics.
For example, Tyler Perry said his dad abused him in part because he was dark-skinned.
In the white world of Abercrombie and Fitch, slender, muscular whites with the old-money chiseled look are in a higher-tier category than whites whose physiques are more corpulent and “blue-collar.”
Class Hauteur Conflicts with Diversity
Abercrombie and Fitch not only exalted a very specific kind of upper-class whiteness and a slender muscular aesthetic, but they wanted to intersect race and class into an exclusive kind of club or what we could call snobbery.
A fancy word for snobbery is hauteur.
To exhibit hauteur is to display an obnoxious sense of superiority over others. Based on “whiteness” and old-money wealth, the Abercrombie and Fitch aesthetic developed an ideal that worked for a short time in the brick-and-mortar shopping mall world of the late 90s and early 2000s, but during the rise of the Internet when young consumers became more interested in diversity and social justice, hauteur and racial exclusivity became repulsive and toxic.
Mike Jeffries was too full of himself and too drunk on his rapid success to see the conflict between his racially exclusive fashion brand and the world changing around him.
Abercrombie prided itself on racial exclusion. That was the whole point of its marketing chimera. It’s discussed in a YouTube video titled “The Incredibly Satisfying Death of Abercombie.”
What was cool became toxic. The backlash was intense and Abercrombie with Mike Jeffries at the helm would fall swiftly.
Mike Jeffries is another uncouth business person who flew too close to the sun. His fall was inevitable.
Zeitgeist and an Outdated Chimera
American youth were transitioning in the late 90s and early 2000s, getting away from conformity and having some adult figure like Mike Jeffries tell them what was cool to more inclusion and more individuality.
Jeffries was so intoxicated by his own Kool-Aid, he didn’t even see what was happening to youth culture.
Here is someone whose bread and butter is on knowing who is target audience is and he has no curiosity or inclination to listen to his target audience--their wants and their values--he’s only interested in his own personal fantasy, so being disconnected from his audience, he was doomed to fail.
Writing about Abercrombie’s snobbery and fall from grace, Owen Gleiberman opines in his essay “Abercrombie and Fitch Review: How Youth Fashion Turned Fascist”:
The brand was unabashed in its insider/outsider snobbery, but the problem with it — and there was a major problem — wasn’t the clothes. It was the fact that not just the company’s advertising aesthetic but its hiring practices were nakedly discriminatory. Abercrombie & Fitch was selling neo-colonial jock chic infused with a barely disguised dollop of white supremacy. Like the models, the sales people who worked on the retail outlet floors all had to conform to an “all-American” ideal — which meant, among other things, an exclusionary whiteness. At an Abercrombie boutique, the text was: We’re white. The subtext was: No one else wanted.
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Gleiberman continues to analyze Abercrombie’s fall as part of the crumbling of mall culture and the rise of social media, which would have no tolerance for Mike Jeffries’ racist employment practices and marketing:
Klayman shows us records of the store’s guide to The Look: what was acceptable for its sales people to wear and, more important, not to wear (dreadlocks, gold chains for men). The company employed very few people of color, and those it did have were mostly confined to the back room, or to late shifts where their job was to clean up. These practices were so overtly discriminatory that in 2003, a class-action lawsuit was filed against Abercrombie. The company settled the suit for $40 million, admitting no guilt but entering into a consent decree in which they agreed to change their recruiting, hiring, and marketing practices. Todd Corley, who was hired to oversee diversity initiatives, is interviewed in the film; he made a few inroads but in other ways was the symbol the company needed to try to change without changing too much.
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Body Shaming, Abuse, Harassment, Assault
As Abercrombie promotes this chimera of idealized white youth, Victoria's Secret does something similar with its “Angels,” anorexic supermodels, an industry also rife with shaming, abuse, harassment, and assault.
This is chronicled in the 3-part docuseries Victoria’s Secret: Angels and Demons on Hulu.
Review the Downward Spiral of Abercrombie
Mike Jeffries is drinking his own Kool-Aid, getting high on his own supply.
Mike Jeffries is drunk from the rapid success of his company.
Mike Jeffries enjoys dominance in a shopping mall retail universe while being blind to the oncoming Internet juggernaut.
Mike Jeffries is imposing racial exclusion on a generation that wants the opposite.
Mike Jeffries is creating a chimera of the slender white body, “White Chic,” to a diverse consumere base, which becomes more and more toxic over time.
The toxic themes of racial exclusion bleed into company hiring policies and even racist graphice T-shirts, revealing the company’s racism and hubris.
The toxic work environment leads to harassment, abuse, bullying, and body shaming.
The company becomes so obnoxious, racist, and toxic that to see it fall is to enjoy a giant slice of schadenfreude.
The Chimera in Good Hair
“Chris Rock explores the private mysteries of beauty salons” by Roger Ebert
"Good Hair" is a documentary about black women and their hair. Chris Rock, the host and narrator, is a likable man, quick, truly curious, with the gift of encouraging people to speak openly about a subject they usually keep private. He conveys a lot of information, but also some unfortunate opinions and misleading facts. That doesn't mean the movie isn't warm, funny and entertaining.
The film got its start for Rock when his little daughter asked him, "Daddy, why don't I have good hair?" He wonders how she got that idea. He discovers that some children even younger than his daughter are already having their hair straightened -- and that for children that is a bad idea. He talks to a great many black women about their hair, beginning with the matriarch Maya Angelou and including such celebrities as Nia Long, Eve, Tracie Thoms, Salli Richardson, Salt-n-Pepa and Raven-Symone.
He discovers that for some black women, attaining "good hair" means either straightening or using extensions. Straightening involves the application of products containing sodium hydroxide, which a dermatologist and a chemist describe as potentially dangerous to the scalp and even to inhale in quantity (your lungs might get straightened). Leave it on too long, and your scalp or face can be burned -- something that has happened to some of the woman featured in the film.
I imagine a good many black women would tell Chris Rock that having "good hair" simply means having hair that is healthy, strong and abundant. Why must it also be straight? Yes, many black women enjoy their straight hair, whether natural or by way of extensions. They look great. But often they go back and forth among hairstyles; that is the way of women, unlike us male clods who settle on a hair style in grade school and stick with it like Rod Blagojevich.
Extensions involve braiding long swatches of hair to existing hair. Think Beyonce. Where does this hair come from? India, mostly, where some women cut off their hair before marriage or for religious purposes and can sell it for amounts that mean a lot in a poor nation.
What about the hazards of straightening? Rock shows a hair-raising demonstration of an aluminum Coke can literally being eaten up in a bath of sodium hydroxide. It may help to recall that another name for sodium hydroxide is "lye." God forbid a woman should put that on her head! What Rock doesn't mention is that few women do. If he had peeked in Wikipedia, he would have learned: "Because of the high incidence and intensity of chemical burns, chemical relaxer manufacturers have now switched to other alkaline chemicals." Modern relaxers can also burn if left on too long, but they won't eat up your Coke cans.
The popularity of Afros in the late 1960s and '70s asserted that natural hair was beautiful just the way it grew (and was styled, cut and shaped, of course; Angela Davis didn't look that good without effort). Classic Davis-style Afros have grown rare, but another "natural" style, braiding, is seen all the time nowadays. Many black women and some men use braids and dreads as a fashion statement.
The use of the word "natural hair" is, in any event, misleading. Take a stroll down the hair products aisle of a drugstore or look at the stock price of Supercuts. Few people of any race wear completely natural hair. If they did, we would be a nation of Unibombers.
Black hair is a $9 billion industry. Rock plunges in. He visits Dudley Products in Atlanta, a black-owned hair-products empire, and is fascinated by the Bronner Bros. International Hair Show, an annual convention in Atlanta. Here a vast convention hall is jammed with the booths of hair-care companies, and there's an annual competition to name the hairdresser of the year. The contest is fascinating, not least because it seems to have little to do with actually taking care of someone's hair. Would you want your hair done by a stylist hanging upside down from a trapeze? Or joining you inside a giant aquarium? Showmanship is everything; one of the four finalists is a young white man who is treasured by his clients.
What Rock does is help create a film, directed by Jeff Stilson, with much good feeling and instinctive sympathy for our desire to look as good as we can. He asks direct questions, but doesn't cross-examine; he reacts with well-timed one-liners, and he has a hilarious, spontaneous conversation with some black men in a barbershop that gets into areas that are rarely spoken about. The movie has a good feeling, but why do I know more about this subject than Chris Rock does? Smile.
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“Good Hair? Hardly. How Chris Rock Gets It Wrong” by Alynda Wheat
Chris Rock’s documentary, Good Hair, opened Friday to mixed, but frequently positive, reviews. I’m going to take the painful stance of suggesting that’s because there aren’t a lot of black women in the film reviewing community. Good Hair is often funny, fascinating, and raises a few key ideas. What it doesn’t do is offer a cogent, relevant analysis of why black women relax their hair or wear hair extensions — which was supposed to have been the point.
Some background: Rock says he did the film because his daughter came to him one day, upset, that she didn’t have “good hair.” This apparently prompted the comedian to begin an odyssey that took him from the hair salons of New York City to a hair show in Atlanta, from Indian hair-shaving ceremonies, to the Beverly Hills salons that buy the Indian hair. But in all that conversation what you never hear are opposing viewpoints. Nearly everyone in Chris Rock’s movie seems to agree on a few critical ideas (that can happen when you limit your sample). Frankly, as a black woman, I sat through Good Hair with one dominant thought: Who are these people? Their opinions rarely represented my own, or those of anyone I know. I am but one voice in this vast, complicated community, but I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t say something. Here, a few of the ways Good Hair gets it entirely wrong.
Black women do not want to be white.
Sure, you can find some poor soul who pops up on Oprah with deep-seated issues, but for the most part, black women are perfectly happy being black women. A brief history: The idea of “good hair” is one that, historically, has been fraught with racial stigma. For various reasons, black people who looked whiter, like their slave masters (read: frequently, their fathers) had advantages over those who looked more like their African ancestors. The preference didn’t die after slavery, however, in one sense surviving as the debate over “good hair.” “Good hair” was that which was easy to comb, long, and silky.
Like many cultural idiosyncrasies, the notion of “good hair” never died completely, but there isn’t anyone in the black community today who doesn’t see the term as dated, self-loathing, and patently foolish. There isn’t a black woman I know who sits down in a stylist’s chair to get a relaxer because she, as Rock posits, wants to look white. Not one. I have a relaxer. I have one for the same reason that I don’t wear makeup, don’t have a gym membership, and can usually be found in jeans and a Gap tee—I’m lazy. I like getting out of the house in a reasonable amount of time, and don’t cope well with a lot of hassle over what I consider superficial things. So why bother fighting my naturally nappy hair on a daily basis when every 8-10 weeks I can pay someone else to do it? Which brings me to my second point…
$1000 at the salon? Get real.
The actresses and singers in Good Hair freely admit to spending a fortune on their hair, which was expected. Wildly unusual was the handful of working-class women willing to pony up a cool grand to get a weave. Again, who are these women? The cost of relaxer varies widely, from, say, $50-$200, depending on what zip code you’re in, and weaves go up significantly from there. But no one in the working class (in their right mind) spends rent on their hair. Anyone who does has way bigger issues than what’s growing out of her head.
We don’t all have weaves or relaxers.
As I mentioned, I have a relaxer, but I have several friends and family members who don’t. And for every 10 black women I know, maybe two have weaves. It’s a common hair-maintenance style, but it certainly doesn’t extend to everyone. So before you assume you know what’s going on with a black woman’s hair, understand that we’re as diverse and varied with our style options as everyone else.
All this is none of your business.
Unless you’re really good friends with someone, it’s rude to ask what’s in their hair, whether relaxer or weave. We’re not anthropological subjects, and we don’t like being treated as curiosities.
White women do it, too.
Approximately 94 minutes of Good Hair is spent exploring ideas of why black women relax their hair (so damaging!) or wear weaves (so delusional!). There’s exactly one minute spent on the fact that white women do it too. White women frequently chemically treat their hair to make it straighter or curlier, and dye it so regularly they don’t even know their natural color. Does this make them culturally insecure? Hardly. Those “extensions” that lots of white women in Hollywood (and elsewhere) sport? They’re the same as weaves. Some may be clipped on or glued in, but as anyone who’s ever watched the make-over episodes of America’s Next Top Model knows, white women wear hair enhancements too. Which brings me to another point…
Women of nearly every culture want long, thick, luxurious hair.
For every black woman who’s ever wanted to look like Beyoncé, there’s a white woman who desperately wanted hair like Farrah. Long, fabulous tresses seems to be an ideal in many, many cultures, and black women shouldn’t be criticized, ostracized, or psychoanalyzed for wanting the same thing.
The whole idea of “good hair” is pretty moot these days.
If “good hair” is that which is silky and manageable, what’s the difference if you’re born with it or your hair dresser gets you there? In its natural state, my hair is kinky and difficult to comb. With a relaxer it’s long and holds curls pretty nicely. So do I have “good hair,” or not? Here’s the fabulous, freeing, culturally uncomplicated answer: I don’t care.
Look, I’m not saying that Good Hair has no purpose. The film introduces a conversation that’s so important, it reached the White House. (Check out the viciously racist commentary on Malia Obama’s twists, or the New Yorker cover with Michelle Obama in an afro and tell me black women’s hair isn’t a political issue.) But there’s rampant misinformation and theories that just don’t hold up. And no one ever seems to really address the cultural roots of Rock’s daughter’s question.
Neither the director nor any of the writers on Good Hair are women. It’s no surprise that a group of fellas got together and came up with a film that, while well-intentioned, just doesn’t get it. But tell me what you think, PopWatchers? Will you see the movie? Have some stories of your own you want to share?
UPDATE: I love the debate here, and please keep it coming! I just want to point out (since a lot of people are addressing it) that I have absolutely no problem with natural hairstyles. I don’t think of the word “nappy” as pejorative (as some people apparently do), and I don’t associate any negativity with natural hair or natural hairstyles. (There is, in fact, an actress in the movie whose natural hair I’d love to have.) I simply said that MY natural hair is difficult to manage. I don’t begin to suppose that everyone’s is. My whole point is that people should be free to do whatever they want with their hair, without feeling like it has some grander cultural or political point. Cut it, curl it, dye it blue. As my mother always tells me, “Do you.”
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“Look but Don’t Tough: It’s All About the Hair” by Jeannette Catsoulis
When one of Chris Rock’s young daughters asked, “Daddy, how come I don’t have good hair?,” the comedian decided to investigate the complex, often troubled relationship between African-American women and their crowning glory. He had no idea what he was in for.
Embarking on a journey that would take him from beauty shops in the United States to a Hindu temple in India, from a hair show in Georgia to a product-manufacturing plant in North Carolina, Mr. Rock unearthed a world of physical, financial and psychological hurt. But though “Good Hair” embraces the pain, digging gingerly into wounds both political and personal, the film feels more like a celebration than a lament. Spirited, probing and frequently hilarious, it coasts on the fearless charm of its front man and the eye-opening candor of its interviewees, most of them women including the actress Nia Long and the hip-hop stars Salt-n-Pepa and all of them ready to dish.
In fact, one of the happy consequences of “Good Hair” should be a radical increase in white-woman empathy for their black sisters. Whether in thrall to “creamy crack,” a scary, aluminum-dissolving chemical otherwise known as relaxer (what it’s really relaxing, observes Mr. Rock astutely, is white people), or the staggeringly expensive and time-consuming weave (often available on layaway plan), the women in the film bare heads and hearts with humor and without complaint.
For the Rev. Al Sharpton, though, that’s part of the problem. “We wear our economic oppression on our heads,” he says, wryly bemoaning the migration of the multibillion-dollar, black hair-products business from African-American to predominantly Asian manufacturers. Oppression takes on a darker hue, however, when the film travels to India to unearth the unwitting and unremunerated suppliers of all that weave- and wig-ready hair: poor, devout women who offer it to their priests in a religious ceremony known as tonsure.
Competently directed by Jeff Stilson, “Good Hair” employs humor as a medium for insightful and often uncomfortable observations on race and conformity. The film’s only misstep is its fixation on the competitors in a flamboyant Atlanta hair show. Far more entertaining are the barbershop conversations in which ordinary men jovially gripe about their honeys’ hairdos; they’re a brotherhood joined in financial commitment and thanks to hands-off-the-head decrees at home emotional frustration.
On a recent “Oprah Winfrey Show,” Mr. Rock ran his fingers excitedly through his host’s luxuriant, natural tresses, unloosed in honor of the visit. “I’ve never done that to a black woman!” he marveled, while Ms. Winfrey, who used to threaten to shave her head when she reached her 50th birthday, giggled delightedly: at that moment, she was just happy not to have followed through with her threat.
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Sample Thesis Statements
They must be the following:
Demonstrable: The information in the thesis generates body paragraphs or “reasons” for supporting your thesis, which will be the bulk of your essay.
Defensible: You can defend your thesis with logic, reasoning, evidence, facts, statistics, and credible sources, and as a result, achieve logos, pathos, and ethos.
Debatable: Your argument has two sides; therefore, you are not presenting a claim that is so obvious and self-evident as to be fatuous.
Sample #1
Mike Jeffries, the former CEO of Abercrombie and Fitch, promoted a chimera based on “whiteness,” a pernicious myth based on a fantasy body aesthetic or the anorexic “chiseled look”; an upper-east-coast WASP lifestyle, exclusiveness or snobbery, and a retroactive society based on a racial hierarchy.
Sample #2
Former Abercrombie and Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries doomed his company to failure by unwittingly clashing his pernicious white mythology with a young generation that was repelled by social exclusivity based on race, economic class, and body shaming.
Sample #3
For former Abercrombie and Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries, the chimera of whiteness was all about cruelty: The cruelty of a rigid racial hierarchy; the cruelty of a rigid economic class stratum; and the cruelty of an anorexic body aesthetic.
Sample #4
The documentaries White Hot and Good Hair successfully illustrate that the chimera of whiteness is all about cruelty: The cruelty of a rigid racial hierarchy; the cruelty of a rigid economic class stratum; and the cruelty of an anorexic body aesthetic.
Sample #4
Whereas White Hot is about the cruelty of the whiteness chimera and all of its contingent pathologies, the documentary Good Hair is less about the chimera of whiteness and more about how hair in black culture is a place of communal connection, self-expression, self-care, and big business.
Sample #5
In Alynda Wheat’s insightful essay “Good Hair? Hardly. How Chris Rock Gets It Wrong,” she persuasively argues that black women are not chasing the chimera of whiteness; rather, they are embracing various hairstyles to celebrate black culture, communal connection, self-expression, self-care, and black business.
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