| |  Gif by Naya Cheyenne | At the age of fourteen, I was playing the game I loved in front of 23,000 people. A sea of red, black, and white chanted in unison and our bodies were pacing up and down the length of the field to the beat of the drums and steel pans as we battled against Chile. The lively mirth had my heart racing for 90 minutes: an evocation of space, a heavenly sphere. They called us the Soca Princesses, not quite Soca Warriors, like our male counterparts, but a name we accepted with pride for representing a country of only 2 million Trinidadians. The Women’s World Cup anthem wasn’t Shakira’s “Waka Waka,” which was used for the men’s South African World Cup the same summer, but the motto “Girls Can Kick Too.” It was a declaration of our dedication, talent, and love for a game that we were constantly told was never ours to play. Following my family’s move to Toronto, I picked up the sport in the concrete tennis courts of my elementary school. What was disguised as a sense of belonging in a predominantly white neighborhood was later a realized path of self-discovery. When I was six years old, Gurinder Chadha was creating a film that would later establish my adolescent identity. In 2003, Bend It Like Beckham premiered in North America, and from it, a space emerged for young women of color struggling with cultural integration. We bear witness as Jess, the main character, played by Parminder Nagra, oscillates between two worlds, juggling lettuce in her kitchen as her mother forces her to learn to cook aloo gobi and jumping into her sari in the football locker room to race back to her sister’s wedding in the final scenes of the film. But “who wants to cook aloo gobi when you can bend a ball like Beckham?” To “bend it like Beckham” is a mastery of maneuvering, a slight outward curve of the boot that sends the ball spiraling in the air, traveling as if it’s going steady but then swerving into the unexpected. With no one to relate to or confide in, Jess does just that. Like most children of immigrants, Jess is expected to fit her parents’ archetype of an Indian girl before negotiating her own identity. From purchasing cleats instead of heels for her sister’s wedding to plotting a fake trip with her sister to attend a weekend match in Germany, it is through continuous acts of defiance that Jess gains her independence and flourishes into her own person. With a Trinidadian father and British mother, I too was taught to weave my worlds together at a young age. I was constantly posed with questions of “Where are you reallllly from?,” “Are you Paki or Punjabi?,” and “Muslim or Hindu?,” and having people tirelessly question my relation to my own parents, ready to fall back on assumptions of adoption or jokes of being swapped at birth. Even on the soccer field, I found myself, at times, as the only brown girl, and like with Jess, it was always relayed to me what a surprise it was that a brown girl could play. And so soccer became my act of defiance. Half of my family is quintessentially English. They had homes with high beams, radiators, fridges full of Yorkshire pudding, and cupboards topped with canned baked beans. The Trinidadian half has inexplicably large reunions in homes of distant relatives with names I cannot recall, with kitchens full of roti and warm sawine, hints of gold, Bollywood songs playing softly in the background, and plush pink sofas full of relatives waiting to pinch your cheeks, bombard you with questions, and ponder why you’re not cooking traditional dishes for a man of your own. “It’s just culture, that’s all,” is the only thing Jess can offer to her teammates to describe the reasoning behind her parents not wanting her to play football, a notion I too find myself falling upon when attempting to explain the inexplicable. Soccer is a sisterhood bound by sacrifice, made up of girls who wake up before dawn to test the limits of their bodies, who spend hours crammed in backseats en route to tournaments, who aren’t afraid to talk back to referees and boast of their purple-yellow bruises. Girls with shin-pad tan lines that carry merit and a self-worth so sturdy that not even a comment like “I’ve never seen a brown girl into football” can shake it. I vividly remember the afternoon my father brought home Really Bend It Like Beckham, a tutorial taught by the legend himself. I remember sinking into the brown leather sofa in our living room, thinking, What does David Beckham know about negotiating your identity? I wanted to see Mia Hamm or, better yet, Marta Vieira da Silva. I wanted to see a female athlete on television somewhere other than in a tampon commercial. I wanted to see the women who sweat and bleed on the battlefields historically claimed by men. But the only girl I saw was Jess, and sometimes all you need is someone who looks like you to fight and win. As the film ends, we find Jess on the pitch. Faced with a free kick that could determine the fate of the championship final, she carefully rests the ball on the grass as a wall is formed ten meters away. Not that of the opposition, but of her mother, sister, and other relatives, clad in saris, bangles flailing as they bicker at her like they always have. A sharp inhale, a quick burst of speed, and she bends the ball over her last remaining obstacle, scoring the game-winner. Jess’s journey is about the complexity of personal and national identity and about hoping to win and learning to accept defeat, but more important, it’s a reminder that, sometimes, to follow your dreams, you’ve got to bend the rules. Geneva Abdul recently graduated from Ryerson University in Toronto with a BA in journalism. She currently works as a freelance writer, with bylines in the Huffington Post and Toronto Life. | | | | |  Illustration by Ran Zheng | “I’ve attributed my investigative experience to the fact that I raised adolescents. The moment one of my kids isn’t telling the truth, I know. If I come home late and I ask the kids, ‘Did you have a party here?,’ and they say, ‘No, what party?,’ I know when they are lying. The moment I heard Bill Baroni, my antenna immediately came out. I knew immediately he was hiding something.” —State Senator Loretta Weinberg, Vanity Fair. It was 2013; Christie’s shoot-from-the-hip style and his handling of Hurricane Sandy, with the infamous bipartisan Obama hug, had made his poll numbers soar. He was being courted by wealthy Republican donors and had his eye on the 2016 presidential race. It seemed impossible to bring down such a popular governor, but impossible is not in my mother’s vocabulary. My mother, aka New Jersey senate majority leader Loretta Weinberg, took down the guy who used to be the biggest bully in politics. Before there was Trump, there was Chris Christie. Politics runs deep in Loretta’s blood. Her father was a big shot in the New York Tammany Hall political machine, where the boys in the back room doled out favors in exchange for votes and the only rules were abuse of power. After her father had an affair, her mother divorced him. As a single woman, her mom tried to buy a floral business, but it was 1945 and she couldn’t get a loan without a husband to co-sign for her. As a young housewife in the 1960s, Loretta spent afternoons at campaign headquarters for various candidates, rolling flyers off mimeograph machines and creating strategy over cold coffee and stale doughnuts. I spent my childhood picketing at the supermarket in support of Cesar Chavez or distributing leaflets for local candidates. I was six years old, but it was campaign season, and all hands were on deck. She won her first election to the town council in 1990, was elected to the State Assembly in 1992, and in 2005 she became a state senator. Our family sacrificed for her many high-octane political battles. In 1998, my dad, who was sick with cancer, spent his final months stumping for my mom when she ran for county executive (she ran while in the Assembly). She lost the election and my father shortly after. He spent the end of his life the same way he had lived all his other days, supporting my mother in everything she did. *** Christie took his first swipe at her in 2011, when my mother criticized him for doling out high salaried patronage jobs to his buddies, many of whom were also collecting six-figure government pensions. At 75, after losing her life savings in the Madoff debacle, Loretta began drawing a small pension from her civil-servant positions while still earning her part-time Senate salary. Christie told reporters they should “take the bat out on her for once.” The press went crazy, and Loretta skewered him during multiple interviews, saying, “Words do matter.” Over the next eight years, she and Christie sparred on everything from funding for Planned Parenthood to smart-gun technology. “If Chris Christie had given out veto pens, I would have a much larger collection of pens from the last seven years,” she told the Daily Beast.  The author with her mother at an old A&P supermarket in 1968. Activist housewives would take turns picketing for workers' rights in front of the Teaneck, NJ store. |
When the busiest bridge in the world had lane closures causing traffic to come to a standstill, she finally brought the “big boy” down. It was the first day of school and the anniversary of 9/11. Getting onto the bridge from the Jersey side was a parking lot. This went on for five long days. The George Washington Bridge is run by the Port Authority (PA) of New York and New Jersey and has a budget of billions. The PA runs the tunnels, airports, and seaports. In 2010, Christie appointed Bill Baroni as the PA deputy executive director, knowing he would be a loyal lieutenant. Christie wanted loyalty around him. My mother knew Baroni from her work with marriage equality. He had been a state senator and the only Republican to offer up a “yes” vote on a bill that sought to legalize gay marriage. After hearing constituent complaints, Loretta decided to attend a subcommittee ethics meeting at the PA to get answers. Baroni claimed the lanes were closed because of a “traffic study.” “I knew immediately something wasn’t right. Just his body language, the look on his face when I asked about it … I knew that there was a cover-up going on the minute I heard him open his mouth,” she would later tell Vanity Fair. Loretta wanted subpoena power to interview witnesses under oath, but Christie had crushed Barbara Buono, his Democratic opponent in the governor race, only a short time earlier, and the Dems weren’t ready for a battle. So Loretta went back to Port Authority meetings in October, November, and again in December, but the board stuck to the “traffic study” story. Loretta brought along Democratic assemblyman John Wisniewski to the next PA meeting. John was on the transportation committee in the Assembly and had subpoena power from a previous investigation. As the two pressed for answers, the governor called them “obsessed, with nothing else to do.” Loretta wouldn’t budge. “I’ve honed my instincts and trusted them completely,” she told reporters when asked about the scandal, which would be called Bridgegate. A short time later, the “time for traffic problems” email written by Christie’s deputy chief of staff, Bridget Kelly, surfaced in the subpoenaed documents. Christie cronies had closed the lanes to punish the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee (the town where the NJ lanes spill in from) because the mayor wouldn’t endorse Christie during his reelection campaign. Despite an apology tour, Christie’s fall was fast and hard. Not much had changed since the corrupt power plays of Tammany Hall, except now an elderly grandmother (as the press likes to call her) who had spent her life being a “voice for the voiceless” (she always tells me) had broken into the back room and taken down the guy no one else could touch. Maybe it was her politician father and struggling divorced mother who had fueled Loretta. As Chris Christie fades into oblivion, my senator mother is going to get pay equity done and funding back to Planned Parenthood. Loretta often tells young women, “I want to leave a whole bunch of troublemakers following in my footsteps.” I hope those troublemakers understand the sacrifices and the spin machines and can stay energized during the long, hard slog of change. Follow Senator Loretta Weinberg on Twitter at @SenatorLorettaW. Francine Weinberg Graff is a writer and producer in Los Angeles. She’s currently shopping a show based on her mother’s amazing political life. |
| | | | | |  Tabitha Soren, Panic Beach 20043, 2015 | In 1962, when black and white was the only way to be taken seriously in photography, Polaroid approached photographer Marie Cosindas, asking her to test the new Polacolor instant film. “I did everything I wasn’t supposed to do,” the late photographer once said, adding that the instant film produced results “like no other color I had used.” The Polaroids caught the eye of curator John Szarkowski at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and four years later, he gave her one of the first exhibitions of color photography. (Over time, Cosindas’s exhibition has been overshadowed by another that came ten years later: a show of color photographs by William Eggleston.) “Her Polaroids are amazing,” photographer Tabitha Soren says. “I can’t believe that they were kept from me until now.” Speaking to me a few weeks after Cincinnati’s FotoFocus symposium, where she first learned of Cosindas and was also the keynote speaker, she admits to feeling shocked that she’s “still discovering women who are written out of history.”  Tabitha Soren, Panic Beach 15763-4, 2012 |
But for an artist who speaks openly about her insecurities in the art world (Soren came to photography late, having started her career as an MTV News reporter), it’s no wonder she relates to these older female artists who are just getting their due. “Making art brings up all your vulnerabilities at all times,” she says. “When you see the number of shows that are given to female artists versus male artists, it’s enough to make you want to just say, ‘Never mind. I’ll go work at a nonprofit instead.’” Soren comes to her practice with the question: “How can I get this done?” It goes beyond getting her due and simply comes down to finding the time to make work while also being a parent. Her series “Panic Beach,” which we’re publishing here, is a good example of that. Wanting to capture the “psychological state of intense anxiety,” she turned to the ocean, the waves acting as a metaphor for the crushing nature of panic attacks. She created her work mostly on the road, but not in the style of many famous male photographers (“You can’t have kids and be walking around aimlessly like a Garry Winogrand,” she says).  Tabitha Soren, Panic Beach 15759-3, 2012 |
Taking her daughters to softball tournaments along the coast of California, she’d sneak out of hotel rooms before dawn to shoot the striking colors of daybreak on the water. “For me to do it at sunrise — it wasn’t going to conflict with any other person’s agenda in my family,” she tells me. “These are the things that dictate what I make and what I don’t. I can’t just get in the car and roam.” Soren’s conflicting identities hinge on another theme touched on at FotoFocus: What does it mean to see as a woman? Writer Claire Lehmann, who was responsible for bringing Cosindas into the day’s conversation, noted on her panel that Polaroid and Kodak film were largely marketed to housewives. The Kodak girl even became a symbol of advertising, representing a certain independent woman who wanted to instantly capture family moments. Later, advertisements mostly showed women photographing flowers in their gardens. This history — yet another example of a product that relegates women to the home — hits the mark on Soren’s frustrations. “Women don’t have the luxury of a singular focus on their work,” she says. But she wouldn’t pass up time with her children even if it meant she could make it to more art openings or have studio visits. “All mothers look back and say, ‘Oh, it went so fast.’ I’ve already got one on the way to college. As long as my eyesight doesn’t go, I can do this for a very long time.”  Tabitha Soren, Panic Beach 15760-4, 2011 |
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Molly Elizalde is an associate editor at Lenny who still wishes she had taken that 8 a.m. history-of-photography class in college. | | | | |  Illustration by Celia Jacobs | We weren’t particularly close, so I was pleasantly surprised when my colleague greeted me so warmly when we ran into each other outside the hotel. We hugged and then proceeded to weave our way through the streets of London to the event we were both attending, making small talk about the weather and our plans for the evening. It was only when we prepared to part ways at the entrance of the venue that I realized she had no idea who I was. She had confused me for another black woman who worked in a different department in a different city. In that brief moment between realizing she didn’t actually know who I was and saying goodbye exists one of the crude realities of what it feels like to be a woman of color at work in this country. Part of me was annoyed that she couldn’t differentiate between the two of us; another part of me didn’t want to embarrass her by correcting the mistake she had made. Being black and female in the workplace means constantly having to walk a tightrope, balancing your own emotions with the perceptions and intentions of others, making everyone feel comfortable, instead of nervous, in the process. When I first started working in corporate America, I was surprised by a lot of things: the volume of back-to-back meetings, the complicated team dynamics, fluctuating office temperatures. But the thing that surprised me the most and what continues to shake me to my core is how few women there are who look like me. In the office, we’re not really supposed to think about race, unless it’s part of our job description. But for black women, that’s almost impossible. Being black is a core part of our identity, and it colors the way we see the world and the way the world sees us. I have had a colleague make jokes on my behalf about eating fried chicken for lunch (I’m a pescatarian); I have had to answer questions about my background in professional settings — not as small talk, but to explain why I deserve to be in the room in the first place. Being black and female at work means navigating insensitivities with dignity and assuming that most people are not ill-intentioned. But in the same way that I can’t tell whether a coworker's performance is affected by a family member’s illness or a spouse’s unemployment, it’s impossible for those around me to know how race affects the person I bring to work every day. Over the past couple of years, the public conversation has shifted when it comes to the challenges facing women and minorities. We can talk more openly about the gender pay gap and diversity quotas. But what we have perhaps missed are all the intangibles that make it so difficult for black women to succeed in corporate America — if they can get there in the first place. Black women make up just 7 percent of the overall workforce in S&P 500 companies compared to white women, who make up 27 percent. On November 6, 2016, a list of the “50 Indispensable Executives in Marketing, Media, and Tech” by Adweek included just one black woman. As of September 25, 2016, only 13 black women ever had raised over $1 million in venture-capital funding for their companies. Compare that to the $15 billion invested by venture-capital firms in the second quarter of 2016. There is an indisputable volume issue with the number of black women in the pipeline, but, beyond that, black women who are in corporate America usually don’t have the resources to navigate the race and gender dynamics that inevitably appear in the workplace. Race creates a divide that most of us wish didn’t exist, especially from nine-to-five. So, rather than talk about it, we try to ignore it. But for black women, race inevitably defines the experiences of who we are at work because it’s how society identifies us when we step outside our doors. We’re more likely to have close family members who have battled poverty, addiction, or faced jail time. Because we’re women, we’re also more likely to have helped these family members pull themselves back up. Black women tend to experience what organizational researchers Dr. Ashleigh Rosette and Dr. Robert Livingston refer to as “double jeopardy” — the negative effects that black women experience in the workplace as a result of the combined consequences of being black and female. Their study found that black women are judged more harshly than white men, black men, and white women when making the same mistakes in the office. So as a result, we usually feel like we have to try twice as hard to even be considered half as good as our peers. Part of addressing the problem begins with changing the leaders we choose to visualize. We’re captivated by women like Bozoma Saint John, Uber’s new chief brand officer, partly because of the scandal surrounding Uber but mostly because we’re not used to seeing a woman who looks like her running a high-profile organization. Being able to see people who look like you matters. If we can start to tip the scale toward more equal representation of all kinds of individuals in the workplace, then we can change a lot: we’ll empower more people to apply to a broader range of companies, and organizations will be stronger because employees will bring diverse perspectives. I’ve been incredibly lucky to work with people I respect throughout my career, so I’ve never felt completely isolated in the workplace. Because of this, I know that most interactions at their core come from a mutual place of respect. That day in London, I walked away from my colleague not feeling angry but rather recognizing, once again, how far there is to go. Making sure more women of color have the resources to enter and succeed in corporate America is a deeper, structural problem. But it’s important to remember that the empowerment created by visibility is unparalleled. Maura Cheeks is a writer who is working on a graduate-school study about the psychological effects of navigating race and gender dynamics in the workplace. | | | | |  Illustration by Lucy Engelman | There’s a reason they throw in that “sickness and health” clause when closing the marriage deal. Sickness and its accompanying stresses are no longer proprietary; they plague your spouse in tandem. Barring any Munchausen fetishists, one would think the stress of an emergency hysterectomy would be the last prelude to a sexy bonding experience. But life is full of surprises. When we first learned the surgery was necessary and imminent, my husband and I both felt a combination of relief and dread. A few years after the birth of our youngest child, I’d developed adenomyosis, a painful condition where small tumors grow into the muscle of the uterus and cause incessant heavy bleeding. Some people with adenomyosis are fortunate enough to be devoid of symptoms, but my bout had worsened to the point that standard medical inquiries about the date of my last menstrual period had no answer — I had a single, debilitating period that went on and on with only the odd day off for months. Needless to say, this became a huge bummer as far as sex was concerned. I rallied with gusto during easier days, but in the week or two before the surgery, I was bleeding so heavily, I’d become severely anemic and it was impossible to lead a normal life, let alone feel even remotely foxy. I could barely socialize or pick up my kids from school without having to rush home, change my dressings, and lie down. I couldn’t sleep through the night because I’d have to address my situation, and I woke up each day in exhausted misery. No one is gleeful at the prospect of their nether regions being sliced, diced, and julienned, but my monthly curse had become a curse indeed, and I was grateful to know I’d eventually be relieved from its spell. That was the relief part of it. Our sense of dread came from the impending logical nightmare of a hysterectomy. I’d just recovered from a surgery that had taken place two months earlier, and my husband had just gone back to work after six weeks of family leave. We couldn’t afford an extra set of hands, and in spite of a rare plea my husband made for help, all three sets of our parents wouldn’t go out of their way to help us with child care, coating an already undesirable situation with a layer of extra stress. Fortunately, a friend took pity on us and volunteered to take our kids for the night so my husband could be by my side during the surgery. Who knew having your insides rearranged could be so romantic? The guy held my hand, cracked jokes, and kissed me tenderly right up until they wheeled me in. When I woke afterward, he was right there by my side. With the fetching, open-back hospital gown blending so well with my wan, green-gilled post-anesthesia countenance, it would have been very difficult for me to feel less attractive. But I didn’t care. His mere presence trumped any IV painkiller, and wouldn’t you know, in the least sexually enticing situation possible, I found myself consumed with desire for him. Just as he came to visit the next day, our child-care savior and our kids fell very ill, and my husband had to go directly from holding my hand in a hospital room to holding our kids’ hair over the bowl. As he beat his hasty retreat, I began to sob out loud. I can usually find the humor in stressful situations, but vacillating hormones combined with the inability to be there for my sick children tossed me into a hard-core depression. I ached for the company of my husband to the point that it amplified my physical pain. One thought led to another: All I wanted was to fast-forward to a time I could shower him with love, joy, and pleasure. Then it dawned on me that, after all the puzzle pieces inside me had been rearranged, I might feel different to him when we had sex, which only made things worse. My roommate, a lovely grandmother suffering from a bladder surgery gone wrong, heard me sniffling away and asked me, quietly, “You had a hysterectomy?” I said yes. “Don’t worry, Mama,” she said in a maternal tone accustomed to soothing pain and disappointment. “You’re going to feel so much better in a few weeks. And woo! You all are going to have a second honeymoon!” This nugget of info perked me up. She went on to explain how once she hadn’t had to worry about bleeding or pregnancy, she and her husband had experienced a rebirth in their relationship. For the first time in years, the act of sex was released from any possible consequence and became a pursuit of sheer pleasure for pleasure’s sake. After this hearty little pep talk, a great sense of ease crept into my soul. Still, I was nervous about this no-sex phase after my surgery. Taking sex off the table, even for six weeks, can seriously shift the gears of a relationship. When your days are consumed with work and chasing children, gestures like hand-holding, impulsive hugs, and butterfly kisses transition from “just because” demonstrations of affection to straight-up foreplay. But without the promise of actual sex, these little passes can become less frequent, and before you know it, you’re flopped on opposing ends of the couch, the remote resting between you — a dividing buffer favored by the platonic. My worries were unfounded. Throughout our enforced sexual break, my husband never denied me little displays of affection — even while doing decidedly unromantic things like helping me waddle to the bathroom and assuming the complete care of our children. In spite of the fact that the only decent stretch of time we’d had alone in years was spent sequestered in a hospital room, I’m happy to report that my sweet roommate was right. Seven years have since passed, and I now regard my hysterectomy as a tremendous gift. I recognize I was fortunate enough to be done with my uterus before it quit on me; many women are not as lucky. As soon as I was no longer burdened by a malfunctioning reproductive system, that sense of liberation my roommate spoke of did wonders for my morale. Finally, it reminded me how lucky I am to be with my husband. There is no one on this earth I’d rather have help me to the bathroom, and, when it’s my turn, there’s no one I’d rather help to the bathroom. And, in case you’re wondering, our remote has yet to come between us. Vivian Manning-Schaffel is a journalist, essayist, and rumpshaker who’s written for the New York Times, The Week, NBC News, New York, and a wide variety of additional publications. She’s currently at work on her first novel. | | | | | | | | |
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