“Revolution will come in a form we cannot yet
imagine,” the critical theorists Fred Moten and Stefano Harney wrote in
their 2013 essay “The Undercommons,” about the need to radically upend
hierarchical institutions. I thought of their prophecy in October, when a
private document listing allegations of sexual harassment and abuse by
dozens of men in publishing and media surfaced online.
The list — a Google spreadsheet initially
shared exclusively among women, who could anonymously add to it — was
created in the immediate aftermath of reports about sexual assault by
Harvey Weinstein. The atmosphere among female journalists was thick with
the tension of watching the press expose the moral wrongs of Hollywood
while neglecting to interrogate our own. The existence of the list
suggested that things were worse than we even imagined, given all that
it revealed. It was horrifying to see the names of colleagues and
friends — people you had mingled with at parties and accepted drinks
from — accused of heinous acts.
A few days after the list appeared, I was in a
van with a half dozen other women of color, riding through the desert
on our way to a writing retreat. All of us worked in media; most of us
had not realized the extent to which harassment polluted our industry.
Whisper networks, in which women share secret warnings via word of
mouth, require women to tell others whom to avoid and whom to ignore.
They are based on trust, and any social hierarchy is rife with the
privilege of deciding who gets access to information. Perhaps we were
perceived as outsiders, or maybe we weren’t seen as vulnerable. We
hadn’t been invited to the happy hours or chats or email threads where
such information is presumably shared. The list was F.T.B.T. — for them,
by them — meaning, by white women about their experiences with the
white men who made up a majority of the names on it. Despite my working
in New York media for 10 years, it was my first “whisper” of any kind, a
realization that felt almost as hurtful as reading the acts described
on the list itself.
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