The Essential Ellen Willis

Introduction

309 I wish Ellen Willis were no longer relevant. That’s not to knock the quality of her work, which is equal parts poignant, dynamic, scathing, and sharp like a scalpel. Rather, it is her targets that I find so contemptible—pernicious because of their resilience: sexism, racism, classism, craven politicians and journalists, greedy businesspeople, hypocritical liberals lacking in guts. The divisions in society continue to outlive those who have spent entire careers trying to destroy them, leaving us where we are today: without Willis yet still surrounded by her foes. For a glimpse at how pertinent much of Willis’s decades-old work is, one need only read this passage from “What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about The Bell Curve,” her exploration of the infamous 1994 IQ hagiography: Companies are shedding managers and replacing engineers and computer programmers with machines. The job markets in the academy and the publishing industry are dismal, support for artists and writers are even scarcer than usual, the public and nonprofit sectors—hotbeds of cognitive elitism—steadily shrinking. Nor are card-carrying CE [cognitive elite] members exempt from the pervasive trend toward employment of part-time, temporary, and benefitfree workers. Wealth is increasingly concentrated at the top and, last I looked, still handily outstrips other sources of power. Put that nearly fifteen-year-old paragraph into next week’s Village Voice and nobody would bat an eyelash. Just because the Million Man March and the O. J. Simpson trial have faded from the headlines doesn’t mean the lessons about INTRODUCTION Cord Jefferson 310 THE NINETIES race and gender roiling within them aren’t as important in our era of stop-andfrisk policies and double-digit black unemployment. Like today, black communities in the ’90s were being decimated by the rise in the prison industrial complex . The crack era was on a downswing, but young black men clashing with police was common and, as Willis argues in the accusatorily named “Rodney King’s Revenge,” the impetus for many African Americans to breathe a sigh of relief when O. J. Simpson was acquitted of murder. Later in the decade, Willis would speak unflinchingly about the misogyny and sex-negativity inherent in the media’s reaction to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal—and the president’s, too. In “Monica and Barbara and Primal Concerns ,” Willis notes that despite being relentlessly characterized by the right as a pot-smoking, countercultural radical, the president showed his true colors when backed into a corner built by a blowjob and a stained blue dress. “It was Mr. Clinton who cheapened their relationship with his angry denial, his ‘harsh’ and ‘hurtful’ reference to her as ‘that woman,’ his maligning her as a stalker and his eventual portrayal of their sexual contact as entirely one-sided,” writes Willis. Meanwhile, the “eat-your-vegetables school of journalism” failed to see how the scandal had uncovered “primal human concerns.” That doesn’t sound so unlike our current status: while conservative lawmakers may be the ones stripping away women’s rights, commentators across the political spectrum are complaining that we have spent too much time focusing on “social issues” and not enough time fixing the economy. That’s an ugly little sleight of hand that’s become a go-to grievance of both the right and the left. One other essential bit of Willis worth stealing, no matter who you are, is her willingness to provoke and chastise her own left-of-center ilk when necessary. Many of Willis’s nineties contemporaries, for instance, found it difficult to address the Million Man March’s obvious sexism, and Louis Farrakhan’s obvious anti-Semitism, because to do so could be perceived as antiblack or cynical about a march that was supposed to be peaceful and kind. Calling the event a shot at a “utopian moment,” Willis nevertheless wrote, “It’s a mistake to imagine that the good feelings generated by the Million Man March negate its political dangers .” As a person of color, I’m not sure I can agree with Willis on this one. But as someone who loathes cowardice in the face of sanctimonious liberal tyrants and supports stepping on sacred toes in an effort to beat back bullshit, I surely do appreciate her. CORD JEFFERSON is a writer and editor living in Los Angeles. ...