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Who is the Real Snake? Ethical Considerations of Killing Invasive Species
Get PDFThe kitschy, yet dramatic music plays. A reporter stands in a random marsh vaguely reminiscent of the story she is about to tell. You see some home-video quality clips, and of course, you hear the iconic closing line: “I’m Janine Stanwood. Local 10 News” (Pythons 2:22). Yes, local news segments can sometimes appear to be pointless time-fillers, but they do occasionally hit on controversial topics, such as the segment referenced here on “python hunters,” mercenaries paid by Florida’s government to catch and kill invasive Burmese pythons in the Florida Everglades.
Although the hunters make sure to emphasize that their primary objective is ecological, emphatically stating, “every single python that we take out is one less consuming our native wildlife” (Pythons 1:55), watching the clip, one gets the sense that the python hunters are not solely committed to preserving South Florida’s native wildlife, and may even have some less-than-savory opinions regarding the humane treatment of animals. As videos play of the hunters wrestling their catch, a record-setting 18-foot python, they provide their commentary, with lines like “That is so much bigger than anything I’ve ever caught before” and “I don’t know if I could sleep at night losing one that big” (1:33, 1:48). It is tough to miss the massive thrill that the hunters get from wrangling the snakes, especially as they dramatically describe their python-catching process and the “tricked-out Ford Escape” that they use to catch the animals (1:00). The local reporter, Janine Stanwood, glosses over this contradiction, ending the segment by reminding viewers that every python caught is “humanely euthanized” (2:15). This assuring, even academic phrase seems out of place next to the epic action shots of men wearing sleeveless t-shirts battling minivan-sized poisonous snakes. The news clip implies that despite the enjoyment that these men derive from wrestling enormous snakes and the compensation that they receive for it, the hunters are thoughtful ethical actors who are so concerned for native wildlife that they go to the trouble to capture and humanely euthanize pythons (0:16, 2:12). The phrase “humanely euthanized” immediately grounds the clip away from the exciting hunt and down into the ethical debate about animal rights, and that is where the local news editors decide to cut the clip.
One could argue that the mixed motives this clip captures invite a broader discussion about the ethics of killing invasive species. In 1975, Peter Singer, a famous ethicist, published a controversial book titled Animal Liberation in which he used principles of equal rights (typically applied to humans) to persuasively argue against killing animals under any circumstance. In the chapter titled “All Animals Are Equal,” Singer does not distinguish between invasive species and native species, arguing that causing any animal suffering should be seen as equal to causing the equivalent suffering to a human, and should therefore be forbidden. Michael Pollan, a science journalist and critic of Singer, responded to Animal Liberation in his 2002 article in the New York Times titled “An Animal’s Place.” In this article, Pollan grants Singer’s general point regarding inhumanely killing domesticated animals for food, but argues that invasive species belong in a separate category. Pollan cites a parallel example to that of the Burmese pythons in South Florida, writing about a herd of escaped goats on Wrightson Island that have decimated the local plant life. Pollan then goes on to attack the moral basis behind the idea of favoring individual animals over species, writing, “The story of Wrightson Island . . . suggests at the very least that a human morality based on individual rights makes for an awkward fit when applied to the natural world.” Pollan seems to imply that Singer and his ideological allies are likely to disagree with killing invasive animals, and simply by looking at the title of Singer’s chapter “All Animals Are Equal,” it is hard to disagree. In this case, Pollan’s arguments upend a significant implication of Singer’s application of utilitarian philosophy to animal rights. As a self-described utilitarian, Singer’s mission is to reduce the net suffering of individuals. However, by prioritizing the experiences of Burmese pythons in the Everglades, Singer’s strict adherence to utilitarian philosophy risks destroying an entire ecosystem. As Pollan’s argument shows, surely the rational move is to remove the invasive species and save the others.
However, even with this ethical principle in hand, watching the python hunters marvel at their catch does not feel guiltless. The hunters—who upload videos of their catches on YouTube, sport shirts that say “Feel the Burm” and “Snakeaholic,” and, in one shot, show the camera the snake’s jaws opening as they clutch its neck—are a far cry from Pollan and Singer’s carefully considered ethics. The hunters do make sure to say that “every single python that we take out is one less consuming our native wildlife, and that’s what it's all about,” but this assertion comes only as a conclusion to their descriptions of the intensity and excitement of their innovative python catching techniques (Pythons 1:55). So, while the “snakeaholics” point to their ecological commitments, they simultaneously demonstrate that saving native wildlife is only one aspect of their rationale. The question, then, is one of motives. As established above, it is ethical to kill off invasive species that are causing immense suffering to other populations. But, what if those acting out this heavy decision are using it as cover to have fun, hunt without a license, and get featured as heroes on the local news?
This question brings up the interesting connection, or lack thereof, between action and motivation. To the ethicists Singer and Pollan, these aspects are far more tangential to each other than intrinsically linked. In Animal Liberation, Singer writes:
ordinary human beings—not a few exceptionally cruel or heartless humans, but the overwhelming majority of humans—take an active part in, acquiesce in, and allow their taxes to pay for practices that require the sacrifice of the most important interests of members of other species in order to promote the most trivial interests of our own species. (Singer 9)
Singer connects the active—“take an active part in”—and the passive—“acquiesce in, and allow their taxes to pay for”—placing them under the same unethical tent. It follows that this equivalence between actions taken with pure ethical motivations and those taken without them should extend to the inverse case of Singer’s. Thus, the python hunters act ethically even though ethics may not necessarily be their primary motivation. The hunters in this news clip, like most people, act for a multitude of reasons: payment, enjoyment, fame, maybe even a sense of duty to the environment. While the optics might not be great, when it comes to ethics the hunters’ internal motivations are irrelevant. People act for lots of reasons, and while sometimes the reasoning neatly aligns with the moral implications of their actions, it often does not. Even Peter Singer, ardent utilitarian and animal rights activist, agrees: if we want to judge actions, we need to look only at the results.
Pollan also attacks the connection between action and motivation but frames the dilemma differently. Rather than asking whether it matters if one acts with non-ethical motives, Pollan encourages his reader to consider situations where they may act while only partially considering the ethics of their behavior. Throughout “An Animal’s Place,” Pollan threads a personal anecdote of a dinner in which he eats a rib-eye steak while reading Singer’s pro-vegan article. At one point, Pollan writes about how he stops eating his steak, momentarily paralyzed by Singer’s persuasive arguments. Then Pollan writes, “If I believe in equality, and equality is based on interests rather than characteristics, then either I have to take the interests of the steer I’m eating into account or concede that I am a speciesist. For the time being, I decided to plead guilty as charged. I finished my steak” (Pollan). By restating Singer’s convincing arguments about speciesism, yet still eating his steak, Pollan seems to be blatantly disregarding the category of ethics altogether. However, by writing “for the time being,” Pollan hits on a powerful point. Pollan chooses to finish his steak not because he simply does not care about Singer’s arguments, but because he is confident that his lack of a fully formed argument is only temporary, and that he has ethical footing to stand on.
Similarly, the python hunters wrestle and kill the snakes not because they do not care about the ethical implications, but because they can justify their actions by relying on the half-baked claim that “every single python that we take out is one less consuming our native wildlife,” knowing that other ethicists (like Pollan) have done the ethical legwork for them (Pythons 1:55). This allowance for action based on partially developed ethical claims is slightly different from Singer’s answer, which relies on the idea that one’s rationale is totally distinct from one’s actions. Pollan, on the other hand, actually momentarily changes his actions due to his thinking, yet he continues, knowing that he has an ethical basis that can be developed later. Though they tackle the separation between eventual action and prior ethical consideration differently, both of these approaches are essential to everyday life, at least for those who are uninterested in reading or writing treatises on utilitarian animal rights ideology. Like the python hunters and Pollan, people often rely on place-holding claims and proceed with actions anyway. Encouraging this kind of behavior is what allows society to progress, as people can better the world even while their actions and ethics are not exactly aligned.
As much as the local news clip depicts the python hunters as otherworldly heroic figures, they are surprisingly similar to most people in their ethical viewpoints, both in their shortcomings and their successes. In an ideal world, everyone would carefully consider each action before they take it, and then act only out of the purest motivations. However, like the python hunters exemplify, we can encourage people to act ethically, even if they lack or ignore a full sense of the ethical implications. If we wait around for some sort of ethical utopia, we won’t make much-needed progress.
WORKS CITED
“Python hunters break record in South Florida.” YouTube, uploaded by WPLG Local 10, 9 October 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1X0ImHhHLA.
Singer, Peter. “All Animals Are Equal.” Animal Liberation, New York Review of Books, New York, NY, 1990, pp. 1–23.
Pollan, Michael. “An Animal's Place.” New York Times, 10 Nov. 2002, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/10/magazine/an-animal-s-place.html
Will Smith Slapped Chris Rock, But Chris Rock Delivered a Blow to All Black Women
Get PDFAfter two decades of decline, the 2022 Oscars’ viewership was almost at an all-time low (Stoll). Suddenly viewership increased by a staggering 555,000 people (Hsu). The catalyst for this sudden jump was Will Smith casually strolling onstage and slapping Chris Rock in the face on live TV. It was in response to a joke that Chris Rock made about Will Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. After returning to his seat, Smith even followed the slap by shouting, “Keep my wife’s name out your fucking mouth” (Stevens). When the “Slap Story” broke, it seemed to eclipse even the initial media response to the invasion of Ukraine. Instantly pop culture references and thousands of memes were created. In the torrent of op-eds about the incident, most writers focused on the slap and the lasting impacts it would have ranging from how the slap reinforced stereotypes for Black people (Capehart) and women (Abdul-Jabar), set a violent precedent for comedians (Lang), and even how it toxically portrayed violence as an “act of love” (Marples). Others even applauded it, like Tiffany Haddish who stated, “That meant the world to me. And maybe the world might not like how it went down, but for me, it was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen” (Patterson and McNiece). The slap was constantly discussed and stayed in the news cycle for weeks. Even at the Grammys, the slap was still being heavily referenced. Trevor Noah joked we will be “keeping people’s names out of our mouths,” while Questlove stated, “All right, I am going to present this award and I trust that you people will stay 500 feet away from me” (Sharf). We all saw or heard about the slap that reverberated throughout the world, but what about the joke?
For all of the mainstream media coverage and conversation about the incident, the joke itself got relatively little coverage. Most people agreed that Rock handled the slap unbelievably professionally. While this was undoubtedly a positive thing, it also resulted in many focusing on the immorality of the slap rather than the possible immorality of the joke. A headline in the Hindustan Times said it best: “Chris Rock’s joke was bad, Will Smith’s reaction worse” (Mathur). This was something I initially fell victim to as well.
On the surface, the joke is benign. Rock simply said, “‘G.I. Jane 2,’ can’t wait to see it, all right?” “G.I. Jane 2” was an allusion that compared Pinkett Smith to the strong female lead and heroine in G.I. Jane, who was played by the conventionally beautiful, white actress Demi Moore (Davies, Gleiberman). Given this comparison, it could very reasonably be taken as a compliment. One commenter on the movie reviewing platform MovieChat claimed, “If anything, the G.I. Jane comment was kinda a compliment.” Chris Rock also prefaced the joke with “Jada, I love you,” while using a relatively endearing tone to further add to the benign nature of the joke.
Others saw it as less benign. Monica Hesse from the Washington Post opens her article about the incident with, “Chris Rock made a bad joke about Jada Pinkett Smith. Unfortunately, her husband’s offense became the story.” Even given Hesse’s opening, she focuses largely on the slap, something the media as a whole had fallen victim to as well. When the joke’s morality is briefly questioned, those critiques were focused on Pinkett Smith’s disease, alopecia areata, which causes hair loss. This was a common theme among the articles and opinion papers criticizing the joke.
Of course, many people were quick to dismiss the discussion and said there was no harm in the joke. A common argument against caring about and evaluating the morality of the joke is that it’s in fact “just a joke” or that “it wasn’t [that] bad” (Krol).
To adjudicate between these claims of morality we can turn to Robin Tapley, a humor ethicist. In Tapley’s essay “Just Joking: The Ethics of Humor,” she calls into question the “idea that because we are ‘just joking’ we can say anything whatsoever with moral immunity” (181). In Rock’s case, many people give him an extraordinary amount of moral immunity because he is a professional comedian at the Oscars. It is very clear he is making a joke and it is part of his job to make these jokes which further solidifies his moral immunity. Tapley challenges this moral immunity by asserting, “Jokes have an intimate connection with our beliefs, our knowledge, and our interpretation of the world. Jokes have the power to reinforce, promote, or challenge our way of thinking” (172). This direct influence jokes have on our beliefs means that jokes can spread and perpetuate ideas the same way any other speech can and does. It also prompts us to look at what possible beliefs are being conveyed or reinforced by the jokes.
The public largely focused only on how the beliefs conveyed by the joke were benign, potentially problematic because it was about a disease, or that it was simply “just a joke.” However, focusing only on these categories distracts from where the joke was most likely to do harm, that is, to whom the joke was targeted: at a Black woman, her appearance, and even more specifically, her hair. Hair has long been an integral part of a Black person’s identity as well as a target of much scrutiny. As an article titled “Tangled Roots: Decoding the History of Black Hair” explains, “In pre-colonial African societies, Black hair was seen as a symbol of a person's identity… But when the transatlantic slave trade began, these traditions were erased, and a new set of meanings were imposed onto Black people's hair, particularly by white slave owners” (Bero). Throughout history and the present day, Black hair has been villainized, likened to animals, and labeled inferior and dirty in its natural form while called ugly and masculine in its shorter forms when worn by women (Bero).
These anti-Black hair stereotypes are so ingrained and influential in our society that they affect the livelihood and ability of Black people, and especially Black women, to support themselves and their families financially. A study conducted at multiple universities and on multiple hiring platforms and agencies found that “Black women with natural hairstyles were perceived to be less professional, less competent, and less likely to be recommended for a job interview than Black women with straightened hairstyles and White women with either curly or straight hairstyles.” (Koval and Rosette) This issue is so widespread that recently in March of 2022 the CROWN Act was elevated to the House of Representatives and successfully passed. The CROWN Act “ban[s] race-based hair discrimination at work, federal programs and public accommodations” (Diaz). Issues like these don’t often get legislation dedicated to them unless there are numerous studies backing them, on top of lots of advocacy work. Even with legislation like the CROWN Act and advocacy, in order to erase the effects of institutional discrimination, we must work to rectify them socially as well.
Chris Rock himself has shown the public how Black hair is represented and perceived in a more personal context. In 2009 he made a documentary about Black hair titled Good Hair in response to his daughter’s feeling of inferiority caused by her Black hair. In Good Hair, Sheila Bridges, a Black woman, states:
I have alopecia [the condition Pinkett Smith has], which causes hair loss on your head or on your body. I chose not to wear a wig for a number of reasons. There’s this feeling of hiding and I never wanted to feel like I was hiding something. You are sort of accepting who you are and looking in the mirror and feeling as though you’re beautiful and doing it. So I think the reason hair is so important is because our self-esteem is wrapped up in it. It’s like a type of currency for us, even though those standards are completely unrealistic and unattainable, especially for Black women. (1:04:57)
Good Hair is filled with powerful anecdotes like Bridges’. These anecdotes, on top of Rock’s lived experiences, gives him the ability to understand the stigmatization Black people’s appearances have endured, as well as the resulting shame and unequal treatment that come from it. These unattainable standards projected onto Black women are largely damaging not just to their self-esteem but also to their self-worth. Issues of self-worth are especially important in the Black community, which has and is still largely being degraded.
Black women’s appearance and self-esteem have historically been targeted in many ways. One such method is their being labeled as masculine. Unfortunately, a large number of people still wield this stereotype with reckless abandon. Reactions to people like Michelle Obama and Serena Williams illustrate this fact very clearly. Far-right political commentator Alex Jones states, “Michelle appears in photos and videos to have a very large penis in her pants, her shoulders are wide, her face is very, very masculine” (Farand). Comments like these are not limited to hecklers or entertainers; even government officials feel comfortable participating in this rhetoric. Pamela Ramsey Taylor, the director of the Clay County Development Corporation tweeted, “It will be refreshing to have a classy, beautiful, dignified First Lady in the White House. I’m tired of seeing a [sic] Ape in heels” (Chan). While these comments may seem disturbing and surprising, they are not new, and Williams is not treated any better. Even people who watch her claim victory after victory make comments comparing her to a gorilla and calling her “unbelievably dominant . . . and manly” (Desmond-Harris). Similar to Michelle Obama, Williams is targeted by those in official positions of power. “In 2014, a high-ranking Russian tennis official snarkily referred to Serena and her sister Venus as ‘the Williams brothers’” (Kendall). This ridicule doesn’t only happen to hugely successful and high-profile Black women; the everyday Black woman is targeted too. In Hannah Eko’s Buzzfeed article titled “As A Black Woman, I’m Tired of Having to Prove My Womanhood,” she speaks about her experiences of being masculinized and made to feel less than. “For over a decade, I’ve had experiences like these: public instances where I have been mistaken for a man . . . I’m always left disoriented, wondering which fragment of my identity was responsible for the misdirected sir, the muffled joke.” These “muffled jokes” can stem from unmuffled ones like Rock’s. An unintentional and unfortunate undertone of Rock’s joke is the masculinization of Pinkett Smith. Tim Grierson, a film and pop culture journalist, writes about G.I Jane’s haircutting scene as “she shaves off her long hair, symbolically demonstrating she’s just like the men.” With the scene’s symbolism so clearly intended to represent a masculine transformation and not one of traditional beauty, Rock’s joke inherently conveys the same sentiment.
It is especially potent and damaging when these two masculine stereotypes of short hair and Blackness are used in conjunction to dehumanize their target, something not uncommon. Disturbing messages leaked from a Columbia University wrestling team group chat from 2014 illustrate how easily this can occur. Members wrote to one another: “you fucked a bald black girl so you came out like 2 months ago,” and “How big was her dick,” while multiple members upvoted such comments (“Messages Reveal Culture of Intolerance”). Even further, the article about the messages and those much worse were met with mixed reactions. There were hundreds of comments denouncing these sentiments but also hundreds defending the messages saying things like “they aren’t that bad” or “they should be protected under the 1st amendment” (“Messages Reveal Culture of Intolerance”). Comments like these downplay the harm ideas like these can cause in a community or shift the conversation away from the issues brought up that need to be addressed. The stigmatization of Black hair in all forms is widespread and affects the mental health and well-being of Black people everywhere.
Jokes like Rock’s, which are broadcast in front of millions of people, must be looked at with extra caution. These jokes have the ability to spread large amounts of what Tapley calls “social harm . . . harm which affects a group or members of a group that makes up our society” (179). There is a difference between making a possibly harmful joke to a few people and to millions. While both are still harmful, a joke to millions of people has the potential to disseminate the idea to a larger audience. The magnitude of caution we have to use is directly proportional to the size of the platform one has. Rock’s joke targeted at Pinkett Smith could unintentionally perpetuate the downplaying of Black women’s issues on the whole, especially in regards to hair, and end up inflicting this “social harm” on a massive scale.
During an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, Maher jokes about Pinkett Smith saying, “I mean, [it’s] alopecia, it’s not leukemia” (Rowley). Comments and jokes like these, even when unintentionally prompted by Rock’s joke, convey harmful ideas. The idea of downplaying and mishandling Black people and women’s health issues is nothing new and is systematically embedded in our everyday lives. Doctors significantly downplay or underestimate Black people’s pain when compared to non-Black people citing common stereotypes like “black people’s skin is thicker than white people’s skin” (Hoffman et al.). This underestimation of pain is something that multiple studies have shown (Hoffman et al.). On a larger scale, Black women deal with a wholly unequal healthcare system that doesn’t treat them as effectively. This disparity has led to a three-year shorter life expectancy when compared with their white counterparts (Chinn, Martin, and Redmond). Black women also have significantly higher maternal death rates, in some cases up to five times higher, when compared to white women, another result of this healthcare inequity (MacDorman et al.).
So if Rock’s joke brings with it such dangerous implications and potential harm, why would he think it was okay? We will first look at his perspective as a comedian. The joke was something comedians call crowd work, where the comedian interacts and makes jokes with and about the crowd in an unscripted manner (Zinoman). In this sort of freestyle comedy, it is easy to make jokes with one intention but have them end up having unintentional implications. The amount of benign intent contained by the joke and its preface means Rock likely meant it as a relatively positive G.I. Jane joke, rather than one that targets a Black woman’s beauty, namely her hair. Furthermore, even if Rock realized the underlying target of the joke, there is another reason he may have felt willing to make the joke.
Once again we can look to Tapley, who uses a claim from LaFollette and Shanks, two other humor scholars, to explain the relationship between the teller and a joke’s material. “[O]ne needs a ‘psychic distance’ from the beliefs to find humour in [it]” (174). This “psychic distance” is the separation one feels from a topic. For example, people who hear a 9/11 joke who were directly affected by it are less likely to find the joke funny when compared with someone who was unaffected or not alive when the attack occurred. This psychic distance is something that Rock arguably does not have. So then how does this apply to our situation? I would actually look at the opposite side of this concept to explain the joke. Rock’s close psychic proximity actually allowed him to feel comfortable making the joke and finding humor in it. Rock’s joking in this instance feels similar to when someone jokes about those closest to them, but won’t allow others to make the same jokes targeting the same people. Namely, Rock being a Black person himself along with his familiarity and work (Good Hair) to better the perception and understanding of Black hair may have led him to believe the joke was benign as long as he is the one who said it.
But was it? Tapley also discusses the moral implications of the joke teller’s identity and status when defining a morally objectionable joke. In order for a joke to be morally objectionable, there must be a “social disparity” where “the teller of a joke has a voice, and the target does not (or at least not an equally powerful voice by virtue of membership in a particular group)” (182). Some of the difficulty with this criterion is that it can be hard to determine who is in the more socially vulnerable position and even if you can, by how much does one need to be advantaged to make the joke immoral? Rock sees himself as a part of the “Black in-group” along with Pinkett Smith, thus stopping the joke from being morally objectionable. Rock also sees Pinkett Smith as a rich actress married to Will Smith, which puts her at one of the highest social standings possible. It’s understandable why he may have thought he was punching up, that is, joking about someone is a higher social position than him.
But the joke wasn’t just between them. Targeting Pinkett Smith herself may not cause a greater social harm, but it also targets those she represents, Black women, which is how this joke can cause serious social harm. Rock may have had only the best intentions when he made the joke, but even given those intentions, he couldn’t control the repercussions of his joke. These effects are out of his control and connect back to the size of his platform. There are many people who heard the joke and gleaned nothing from it, but there are also many who are more than happy to weaponize it, something that is completely out of Rock’s control. A study done by researchers at multiple universities found that “disparagement humor fosters discrimination against groups for whom society’s attitudes are ambivalent” (Ford et al. 178). While Rock’s joke is not outright disparagement humor, it could be used to inspire and confirm the negative beliefs that motivate disparagement humor toward Black women and Black hair. As we’ve seen from the multiple examples of negative attitudes toward Black women, their hair, and their appearance, there’s already way too much of that.
WORKS CITED
Capehart, Jonathan. “Opinion | Will Smith Didn’t Slap Just Chris Rock.” The Washington Post, 31 Mar. 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/31/will-smith-slap-effect-black-people/.
Chan, Melissa. “Michelle Obama: W Virginia Official Calls Her ‘Ape in Heels.’” Time, 15 Nov. 2016, https://time.com/4571315/west-virginia-michelle-obama-ape-heels/.
Charmaine Patterson and Mia McNiece. “Tiffany Haddish Says Will Smith Stood ‘up for His Wife’ at Oscars: ‘Most Beautiful Thing I’ve Seen’.” PEOPLE.com, March 28, 2022. https://people.com/movies/oscars-2022-tiffany-haddish-responds-to-will-smith-chris-rock-smack/.
Chinn, Juanita J., et al. “Health Equity among Black Women in the United States.” Journal of Women's Health, vol. 30, no. 2, 2021, pp. 212–219, https://doi.org/10.1089/jwh.2020.8868.
Desmond-Harris, Jenée. “Serena Williams Is Constantly the Target of Disgusting Racist and Sexist Attacks.” Vox, 11 Mar. 2015, https://www.vox.com/2015/3/11/8189679/serena-williams-indian-wells-racism.
Diaz, Jaclyn. “The House Passes the Crown Act, a Bill Banning Discrimination on Race-Based Hairdos.” NPR, 18 Mar. 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/03/18/1087661765/house-votes-crown-act-discrimination-hair-style.
Eko, Hannah. “As a Black Woman, I'm Tired of Having to Prove My Womanhood.” BuzzFeed News, 13 Sept. 2021, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/hannaheko/aint-i-a-woman.
Farand, Chloe. “Michelle Obama Is Secretly a Man, Claims Trump's Favourite Conspiracy Theorist.” The Independent, 24 Aug. 2020, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/alex-jones-michelle-obama-man-proof-infowars-conspiracy-theorist-sandy-hook-a7911996.html.
Ford, Thomas E., et al. “Not All Groups Are Equal: Differential Vulnerability of Social Groups to the Prejudice-Releasing Effects of Disparagement Humor.” Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, vol. 17, no. 2, 2013, pp. 178–199, https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430213502558.
Grierson, Tim. “For 25 Years, We've Reduced ‘G.I. Jane’ to Demi Moore's Shaved Head.” MEL Magazine, 28 Mar. 2022, https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/what-is-gi-jane.
Hesse, Monica. “The Misguided Chivalry of Will Smith.” The Washington Post, 29 Mar. 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/03/28/will-smith-jada-pinkett-slap-fallout/.
Hoke, Carlie. “Jim Carrey Explains Why He Was ‘Sickened’ by Will Smith Slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars.” CINEMABLEND, 29 Mar. 2022, https://www.cinemablend.com/movies/jim-carrey-explains-why-he-was-sickened-by-will-smith-slapping-chris-rock-at-the-oscars.
Hoffman, Kelly M., et al. “Racial bias in pain assessment and treatment recommendations, and false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America vol. 113, no. 16, 2016, pp. 4296-4301. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1516047113.
Hsu, Tiffany. “Oscars Audience Grew by 555,000 after Will Smith Slapped Chris Rock.” The New York Times, 29 Mar. 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/29/business/media/oscars-ratings-will-smith-chris-rock.html.
“If Anything, the G.I. Jane Comment Was Kinda a Compliment...” MovieChat, https://moviechat.org/nm0001674/Chris-Rock/62425cabe347d205327e7303/If-anything-the-GI-Jane-comment-was-kinda-a-compliment.
Davies, Jeffrey. “Criminally Underrated: G.I. Jane.” Spectrum Culture, 23 Sept. 2021, spectrumculture.com/2021/09/22/criminally-underrated-g-i-jane/.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. “Will Smith Did a Bad, Bad Thing.” 28 Mar. 2022, https://kareem.substack.com/p/will-smith-did-a-bad-bad-thing?s=r.
Kendall, Erika. “Female Athletes O
Melody and Melancholia: Phoebe Bridgers and the Grieving White Woman
Get PDFPhoebe Bridgers’ Instagram profile picture is a selfie of her crying in the bath, gold eyeshadow and mascara running down her cheeks. Since her debut album in 2017, Bridgers has been known for producing music laden with personal sorrows. Almost five years later, following her second album, Bridgers is still in mourning. She is “Alive with Melancholy,” according to the New York Times (Marchese), and “Very, Very Sad” according to W magazine (Hirschberg). Bridgers’ persona of grief fits into the discussion surrounding pathological grief, introduced by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud in “Mourning and Melancholia.” Freud defines “melancholia” as a state of perpetual, pathological mourning, where the subject loses interest in everything besides mourning (244). But Bridgers’ sadness is more complicated than Freud proposes. When mourning is no longer an internal affair, but something performed for viewers to consume, outward social forces dictate the nature of this mourning more than the individual mourner. With the rise of artists like Bridgers—those female indie singers the world expects to keep singing about loss—how can we integrate society into Freud’s individualist model of melancholia? How do individuals cope when their mourning becomes a sought-after commodity?
Melancholia, Freud argues, is trapped in an individual’s unconscious and reveals internal, pathological affliction. Unlike in mourning, individuals are unconsciously unable to pinpoint what exactly they have lost, and thus cannot let go of or recover from it (Freud 244-46). By Freud’s definition, Bridgers exhibits characteristics of melancholic mental illness, her discography steeped in personal experiences of grief. “Funeral” reflects on ideating suicide as a result of grieving the death of a friend, and “Motion Sickness” deals with mourning the loss of a lover despite suffering abuse from them. From deaths to lost lovers to self-hatred, Bridgers indiscriminately mourns it all, the sources of her grief perhaps becoming peripheral to the grief itself. On Spotify, she’s featured in playlists like “Sad Indie” and “sad girl starter pack.” The top search result in user-made playlists, a “complete playlist of everything,” features a snapshot of Bridgers with makeup-smudging tears reminiscent of her Instagram profile, as if this stereotypically feminine depiction of grief encapsulates her discography. Bridgers’ artistic identity of solely sadness typifies Freud’s model of melancholia. Thus, in applying Freud to Bridgers, we might conclude that Bridgers suffers from internal and psychological damage that refuses to let her escape melancholia.
However, Bridgers isn’t alone as a melancholic artist. Many others, particularly white, cis, women, are known for their sad personas. And throughout history, the art of white women as a whole has stereotypically been viewed as “tragic” and “forlorn” (Mooney 178). Essayist Leslie Jamison notes historical examples of sad white women in a personal piece on melancholia: in 1712, “The Rape of the Lock” depicts a woman mourning the forced removal of a lock of hair; in 1897, Dracula features women being drained of blood; throughout her career in the 20th century, poet Sylvia Plath composed piece after piece about personal agonies (Jamison). Why would white, female subjects of art be psychologically predisposed to melancholia?
Freud’s explanation of melancholia as an issue within one’s own unconscious cannot account for patterns of melancholia within a social group. The questioning of Freud’s focus on internal, “one-person psychology” comes up in “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia” by writer David Eng and psychotherapist Shinhee Han (345). They argue that exterior influences on certain social groups can be one cause of melancholia in denying them the ability to escape reminders of their loss, leading to “unresolved” loss (Eng and Han 344). Specifically focusing on Asian American melancholia, Han and Eng observe that racial stereotypes force people of color to be perpetually reminded of their estrangement from Americanness and whiteness, thus grieving for this lost ideal perpetually (345). Han and Eng expand the scope of the causes of melancholia: in addition to internal forces, social forces can also incite melancholia, and likely do when entire demographics are involved.
The phenomenon of the sad white female artist, too, is socially rather than individually catalyzed. As a male-dominated world paints them as objects of desire, women often have to emphasize various aspects of femininity to be attractive—feminine pain and weakness being one—in order to be sellable (Dibben 334). Though not racial stereotypes, stereotypes of desirable femininity also force specific demographics into melancholia. Jamison cites Susan Sontag, who observes that the grief of women is “interesting” and alluringly “vulnerable,” and that “the melancholy character [is] a superior one” (qtd. in Jamison). Perceived by society as attractive and valued above other appearances, melancholia is a look that society asks women to take on, and praises them for. Because of this expectation placed on women, female artists do not always become melancholic, or become labeled as melancholic, of their own accord.
Bridgers is self-aware of the demands on her suffering. In her song “Savior Complex,” she sings, “Baby, you’re a vampire / You want blood and I promised.” She purposefully aligns herself with women stereotyped into baring their pain, invoking a lover-turned-Dracula that asks for her blood. Contrary to Freud, Bridgers is pigeonholed into melancholia by societal expectations that demand for her to keep revisiting sites of personal loss for popular consumption. In W magazine, when the interviewer asks whether she writes sad music “to release her demons,” Bridgers responds, “Perhaps . . . It can put you in a box, where you feel like you can’t write anything but heartfelt songs that offer an emotional release . . . Capitalism commodifies women’s pain.” (Hirschberg). Bridgers remains unconvinced that her music is a personal pursuit to cope with inner troubles, answering with a doubtful “perhaps.” Instead, she understands her ontology of sadness to be a product of societal—specifically capitalistic—forces. This commodification of women’s pain puts Bridgers in a melancholic box, being asked to produce song after song about loss. This metaphoric boxing-in suggests, furthermore, that outside of a melancholic space, Bridgers lacks existence.
As Bridgers performs melancholia through her music, her melancholia erases her own identity. In melancholia, Bridgers becomes the subject and object of grief as her self is lost to stereotypes of womanhood. Freud notes that self-loss is a principal result of melancholia as a subject identifies with what they have lost so much that they mourn their own ego alongside the object, that their ego itself becomes an object to be annihilated (252). Eng and Han further find self-mourning to be an inevitable result of stereotyping, observing that the model minority myth turns Asian Americans themselves into the lost object as they overwrite their identity with a stereotyped one: “Asian Americans are forced to mimic the model minority stereotype in order to be recognized by mainstream society—in order to be at all . . . mimicry can operate only as a melancholic process” (350). The sad woman stereotype, too, demands mimicry from female artists to please consumers, to “be at all.” In playing into these stereotypes, what Jamison calls “limited and outmoded conceptions of womanhood,” women “no longer fully own their feelings.” It can “[start] to feel like you’re playing a character . . . It can get dangerous,” Bridgers remarks (Hirschberg). She acknowledges that by mimicking something she isn’t—an appearance of perpetual sadness—she becomes an exemplary “character” of womanhood to sell to the public eye, endangering her real self.
Eng and Han liken this Freudian self-mourning to being “haunted by ghosts,” reminders of parts of your identity that you have been forced to shed (349). Bridgers has come to terms with becoming spectral: “A haunted house with a picket fence / To float around and ghost my friends / No, I'm not afraid to disappear,” she sings with conviction on “I Know the End,” adding extra emphasis on the word “no.” She acknowledges her own addiction to pain: “After my first record, my mom thought she was going to have to intervene, because every song was so depressing. In fact, I probably needed that, but hey….” (Hirschberg). Though she admits to the severity of being caught in a cycle of melancholia, to the extent that outward intervention would be required to stop it, she brushes it off with a flippant “but hey….” Willingly, Bridgers subjects herself to the image of the ghostly, blood-drained woman that society demands, and thus falls into melancholia.
If conformation to stereotypes of desirable womanhood is etiological to melancholia, how does race factor in? The sad woman trope is most often a sad white woman (Mooney 181). In many ways, Bridgers’ life ironically fits the model of unattainable ideals—whiteness and middle-class values—that people of color grieve (Eng and Han 345). Bridgers confesses, “I’m a white girl from Pasadena. I went to a very nice school and had a bunch of friends” (Hirschberg). Perhaps her melancholia is tinted with her racial and class privilege and her upbringing in an idyllic suburb as much as it is with her womanhood. In her music videos, Bridgers superimposes her sadness onto worlds of whiteness and wealth, depicting grief that is somehow beautiful. In “Smoke Signals,” Bridgers stands at the center of a gothic ballroom decked out in chandeliers and elegant drapes, a crowd of white people swaying around her. Their dark clothing and slow dancing make the scene funeralesque, but their mourning exists in a definitively white, high-class world. White-only spaces crop up in “Motion Sickness,” too, where Bridgers scooters through a picket-fenced suburb, winding up in a karaoke bar, performing in front of a full audience of white people. This alignment of Bridgers’ grief with whiteness comes hand in hand with the beautification of her grief, as the neon lights of the bar illuminate her face as she sings, or as the camera pans out on her in a gorgeous ballroom. Ultimately, the sadness of a white, wealthy class is associated with beauty.
It is because Bridgers’ grief is romanticized by the fantasies of whiteness and wealth that it’s all the more desirable. Han and Eng argue that specific griefs are “acceptably mourned” because they “include access to political, economic, and cultural privilege; alignment with whiteness and the nation” (362). Because the melancholia displayed in Bridgers’ music can be understood through these national ideals it becomes palatable. “Listening felt so bad and so good,” Jamison writes about her favorite artists, all white women: “Those songs gave me scars to try on like costumes . . . I wanted to be killed and resurrected.” The act of experiencing these women’s grief, playing dress-up with their scars, is alluring—a source of resurrection through pain and death. Because of the appeal of their specific types of pain, societal pressures in demanding emotional labor from white women persists.
However, Bridgers’ melancholia is desirable to society as a whole, not just the white-only spectators of the karaoke bar. People of color remain attracted to the pain of white women even though, as Han and Eng claim, they will never be able to attain it. In a TikTok from September 2020, user @godbamit, a Black man, professes, “I don’t know why I relate with sad white women so much, but Phoebe Bridgers, if you’re seeing this, you leave me alone” (bam [@godbamit]). His voice trembles into performed desperation, camera shaking violently until his face blurs. Maybe, like Jamison says, it’s through pain that we’re best able to “try on” the “costumes” of others. After all, it’s Bridgers’ performances of melancholia that hollow her songs into ghosts, as if inviting others to fill in translucent spaces with their own identity. Maybe, by putting on Bridgers’ melancholia, people of color can momentarily experience the ideal of white skin as their own, able to indulge in pain that is prettier, more perfect—pain that can be enjoyed as a luxury rather than suffered as a punishment. As the face of @godbamit blurs into obscurity, we can almost imagine his own identity and melancholia melting for a second as he comes into contact with the lost ideal of whiteness.
As Bridgers mourns, we all mourn. As society pushes Bridgers and other white women into artistic melancholia, she broadcasts her pains back, prompting us to grieve with her, to grieve her. We all—white and non-white alike, woman and non-woman alike—are caught up in a collective cycle of mourning the beautified pain of white women, entering a feedback loop where we ask her to show us her wounds so we can forget ours; when she shows them to us, we only ache more. We’re haunted by Bridgers’ phantoms, “with the same three songs over and over,” she sings in “Chinese Satellite.” “I wish I wrote it, but I didn’t so I learn the words,” Bridgers continues, “Hum along ‘til the feeling’s gone forever.”
NOTE
All quotes or references to lyrics come from Genius (genius.com); all references to music videos come from Phoebe Bridgers on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh4PO1W9tVmHujIPZnfK8TQ).
WORKS CITED
bam [@godbamit]. “I don’t know why I relate with sad white women so much.” TikTok, 2 September 2020, https://www.tiktok.com/@godbamit/video/6867743397696802053.
Dibben, Nicola. “Representations of Femininity in Popular Music.” Popular Music, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 331–55, http://www.jstor.org/stable/853611.
Eng, David and Shinhee Han. “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, vol. 10, no. 4, 2000, pp. 667-700, https://www.vanderbilt.edu/olli/class-materials/ADialogueOnRacialMelancholia.pdf.
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. XIV), edited by James Strachley, Hogarth, 1975, pp. 243-58.
Hirschberg, Lynn. “Phoebe Bridgers on the Dangerous Side of Writing ‘Very, Very Sad’ Music.” W magazine, 15 June 2021, https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/phoebe-bridgers-punisher-snl-guitar-interview.
Jamison, Leslie. “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain.” Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 2014, http://www.vqronline.org/essays-articles/2014/04/grand-unified-theory-female-pain.
Marchese, David. “Phoebe Bridgers is Alive with Melancholy.” New York Times, 10 March 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/10/magazine/phoebe-bridgers-interview.html.
Mooney, Heather. “Sad Girls and Carefree Black Girls: Affect, Race, (Dis)Possession, and Protest.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 3 & 4, pp. 175–94, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26511338
An Interview with APPLE Lecture Speaker Dr. Walt Wolfram
Get PDFOn March 3, 2023, the Studies in Applied Linguistics and TESOL (SALT) journal interviewed Dr. Walt Wolfram, an invited speaker for the 2023 APPLE Lecture Series hosted by the Applied Linguistics and TESOL Program at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Walt Wolfram is William C. Friday Distinguished University Professor at North Carolina State University, where he also directs the Language and Life Project. He has pioneered research on social and ethnic dialects since the 1960s and published 23 books and more than 300 articles. Over the last two decades, he and his students have conducted more than 3,500 sociolinguistic interviews with residents of North Carolina and beyond. In addition to his research interests, Professor Wolfram is particularly interested in the application of sociolinguistic information to the public, including the production of television documentaries, the construction of museum exhibits, and the development of innovative formal and informal materials related to language diversity for different institutions. He has received numerous awards, including the North Carolina Award (the highest award given to a citizen of North Carolina), Caldwell Humanities Laureate from the NC Humanities Council, the Holladay Medal at NC State, the Board of Governor’s Holshouser Award for Excellence in Public Service, and the Linguistics, Language and the Public Award from the Linguistic Society of America. He has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and served as President of the Linguistic Society of America, the American Dialect Society, and the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics. We thank Dr. Wolfram for his participation in this interview
Teachers as Researchers: Exploratory Practice in Tunisian EFL Classrooms
Get PDFThis Special Issue is dedicated to teachers’ exploratory practice research (Allwright, 2005; Allwright & Hanks, 2009). It showcases nine studies conducted by Tunisian EFL teachers in their own classrooms.
In the publishing world of TESOL and applied linguistics, despite a proliferation of journals and edited volumes in recent decades, there remains hardly any space for practitioner research. Book publishers and journal editors, driven in part by concerns about profit margins, tend to reject this type of research (unabashedly) citing, as pretexts, the lack of geographical reach or lack of name recognition among contributors. Against this backdrop, this Special Issue counters the commercial mindset and helps fill a longstanding void in TESOL and applied linguistics literature. It illustrates how exploratory practice research can be done and illuminates the potential of practitioner research and the largely untapped ingenuity of practitioners.
As an introduction to this Special Issue, we will, briefly, discuss the research-practice divide phenomenon and describe the genre of exploratory practice (EP). After, we present a synopsis of nine EP studies. We conclude by emphasizing the unique role of EP in advancing foreign language instruction and suggesting ways to substantiate it
An Exploratory Practice Study on the Impact of the Problem-Based Learning Approach in a TEYL Course on Pre-Service Primary School Teachers
Get PDFThis exploratory practice study explores the impact of problem-based learning (PBL) in a teaching English to young learners (TEYL) course on pre-service primary school teachers at the Higher Institute of Arts and Crafts of Tataouine, Tunisia. A survey was used to collect information about pre-service teachers’ attitudes towards PBL. The findings suggest that the pre-service teachers found PBL to be effective and engaging as an instructional approach in that it helped them develop their critical thinking, team-building skills, and self-directed learning. 
Impact of Evidence-Based Instruction on Teachers’ Views of Teaching and their Learning of TEYL-Related Concepts
Get PDFThis exploratory practice study attempts to investigate the impact of a newly designed TEYL (Teaching English to Young Learners) course on pre-service teachers’ learning at the Institut Supérieur des Arts et Métiers, Tataouine (ISAMT). The study also examined their views of teaching as they will soon graduate and join the teaching profession. Several types of assessment (formative and summative) were designed to diagnose and assess students’ views of teaching and knowledge of TEYL-related concepts before and after the TEYL course. Findings reveal that while students’ understanding of TEYL concepts has improved, their English language proficiency remains a major obstacle to fully benefitting from the course. 
Deciphering Guarapachangueo: Formulas and Formulaic Variation in Contemporary Rumba Percussion
No full textThis article serves to further the conceptual and musical analysis of guarapachangueo, a key influence in the contemporary style of the percussion in Havana-style rumba. I follow Turino’s (2009) lead in distinguishing between improvisation and formulaic performance in analyzing the rhythmic vocabulary of guarapachangueo as a set of related formulas and variations. In doing so, I expand upon and refine some of the characteristics of guarapachangeuo described by Bodenheimer (2015), particularly the common and yet nebulous idea that the style entails increased improvisation in the lower register of the percussion. As an active performer of the style who specializes in the lower register percussion, I will draw upon my experiences and those of fellow rumberos, as well as commercial recordings and online videos of rumba in highlighting the structural formulas used in rumba’s contemporary rhythmic vocabulary. I argue that rather than increased improvisation, guarapachangueo comprises an aesthetic approach to playing rumba in which unique formulas are employed, representing a break with the standardized formulas of traditional rumba from the second half of the 20th century. These formulas produce a heightened sense of tension and release in which increased space and the interactive exchange of percussive phrases are central. Internalized by drummers, these formulas and variations become part of the performer’s musical habitus and are drawn upon—often unconsciously—by the musicians in the form of musical decisions that “say something” in the flow of a rumba performance
Comparing Sodium-ion Battery Electrode Materials in the Scope of Grid-Scale Batteries supporting Renewable Energy Sources and Future Electrification Demands
No full textWith current emission outputs from electricity generation, multiple stakeholders seek to decarbonize and transform current energy grid technology and energy generators. In support of this transition, this paper analyzes the technological capabilities of current grid-scale level energy storage systems and provides a process of prioritizing electrode material qualities. In specific, this paper explores anode and cathode materials for Sodium-ion batteries utilizing attributes oriented for energy grid usage. This paper proposes the weighted-ranking system considering factors of reversible capacity, energy density, cycling ability, and material abundance. This paper seeks to aid those researching future electrode materials for SIBs in the context of future grid-scale level batteries through contextualizing various electrode materials in comparison. This paper also seeks to provide a valid method of comparing multiple electrode materials to recommend specific research and development areas
Impact of an integrated clinical experience on Doctor of Physical Therapy students: a qualitative study
No full textPurpose: Integrated Clinical Education (ICE) complements didactic material within educational programs, providing an in- person, hands-on experience in coordination with traditional instruction. Different models of ICE are described in the literature, which consists primarily of descriptions and program assessments of these experiences. The purpose of this study was to enhance the literature by applying rigorous methodology to gain a rich understanding of the student’s perspective of the process and impact of ICE on Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) students working with older adults, a population not yet rigorously studied.
Methods: A convenience sample of 19 DPT students participated in this study. A descriptive phenomenological approach obtained the perspectives of DPT students engaged in this ICE. Researchers conducted six focus groups using a video chat format following the ICE.
Results: Five themes emerged from the thematic analysis of focus group transcriptions: transformation, circular learning, role of relationships, rollercoaster of emotions, and perceived perks for older adults through the students’ perspective.
Conclusion: Findings are consistent with the literature and support ICE as a complement to didactic learning, especially for those skills that are challenging to teach in the classroom. This study added to the literature by identifying relationship building and circular learning as essential components of ICE. Students also identified and resolved implicit biases previously held about older adults. Further research is warranted to deepen an understanding of these findings, with a mixed-method approach to gather quantitative data to link the ICE process with outcomes