Ideas

xoJane.com is where women go to be their unabashed selves, and where their unabashed selves are applauded

A meditation on saying goodbye from a master of the form

Editor’s Note: xoJane was lucky enough to have Taylor Negron write for them at the site from time to time. This was the final piece he wrote for xoJane, and they have decided to run it under circumstances they never wanted to — on the occasion of his untimely passing today. Taylor was 57. Like everything he wrote, this piece is funny and reflective, rare and true. Goodbye, Taylor. There has never been another like you and there never will be again. You will be missed so very much.

After 30 years in show business I’ve given up on the idea that people will know my first and last name together, and I’ve accepted that I will never, ever be actually famous.

Instead, I am fame-ish.

“Are you the dragon salesman on The Wizards of Waverly Place?”

“Are you Nacho Butt from Angels in the Outfield?”

“Do you work at Red Lobster?”

Or as I get most frequently, strangers simply roll down their car windows, point and shout at me these two magical words: “AREA RUG!”

As much as I love a callback from Punchline, I sometimes get thrown off track when New Yorkers ask me these questions in response to when I ask them a question. Like, “Is this subway express or local?”

They reply with: “Were you on Seinfeld?”

Being polite, I tell them, “Yes, I was on the smelly car episode,” and before you hear, “Stand clear of the closing doors,” I am 105 blocks past my stop.

Strolling on an island with 11 million inhabitants, there are people who do narrow their eyes a little upon seeing my face, then point at me as if to say, “Isn’t that the spaz from Special P.E.?”

I walk on by confident knowing that I am not a “spaz” — I just played one on TV. Why I once played a “psycho spaz” with a fully loaded assault rifle in a Bruce Willis movie.

Most of the time, however, the question is not specific.

It is simply: “Where do I know you from?”

I customize my answer based on age. If you are a woman in your thirties I will most likely smile and respond with assurance: “I was Monica’s boss on Friends.”

If you are a man in your fifties, I clap him on the back and say: “Ah yes, you might know me as Rodney Dangerfield’s son-in-law from Easy Money.”

That’s part of the fun of being That Guy.

Honestly, I never searched out celebrity anyway. All I ever wanted was to be a tortured artist who occasionally wears Max Factor Tan No. #2 foundation.

By the time I was 15, I was a child actor, proudly jaded and war torn, glad to have gotten the promises kicked out of me early. I have worked steadily, starting out as a cartoon model at Hannah Barbara and have the coloring book to prove it.

Being fame-ish is comforting to some. I have come to understand that viewers who knew me when they were young grew up with me. Subsequently when I hear, “Hey, you’re that guy from so and so,” it doesn’t bother my ego, it makes me very proud that I am a shape shifter.

And maybe it was worth going on those four callbacks for That’s So Raven.

Having been raised in the Charles Manson part of Los Angeles with a rock star for a cousin (Chuck Negron from Three Dog Night), I contemplated at an early age that fame was something to be slightly scared of — like doctors or palmetto bugs.

Having brushes with fame but realizing that I will always be That Guy, it’s been easy for me let go of my ego.

Over the years, I have enjoyed my proximity to Hollywood and to celebrity itself knowing fully well that a truly huge career can only happen with an ambitious, determined team of agents, club owners and carefully placed waitresses. I’ve let go of being the guy who gets the girl to help the girl who wants the guy.

Instead, I am the Alternative Everyman. I have been your postman. I am the man who delivered your pizza. I was the gang member who kidnapped your daughter at gunpoint. I’m a nanny for children. I am a stylist for Stuart Little. I am your shrink. I direct porn films. I am the groom and the maid of honor.

These are just a few of the parts I have played over the last 30 years. But today it is different.

Nowadays in Hollywood there is a new austerity that has changed not only the culture but also the engines of the entertainment business itself. Digital camera costs are down and a great many character actors from the 1980s are going to have to accept their future the same way the Titanic accepted the iceberg.

Everything has changed. What people call each other has changed, too.

When I started out at age 15, having the first name “Taylor” was a rarity. Now it’s become the go-to name for every little girl on Planet Earth. I can’t walk into a Whole Foods without hearing a mother scream “Taylor, don’t do that with that olive!”

I enjoy that I am a “Taylor” in the tradition of “Swift” and “Dane.” It supports my tried and true pansexuality. Really, I am just grateful I am on the actor’s food chain at all. Stefon talked about me on “SNL.” The punk band Anthrax wrote a song referring to my role in Rodney Dangerfield’s “Easy Money.” All very fame-ish credits.

Sometimes, my quasi-celebrity makes me vacillate between defensiveness, shame and then pure joy.

In Central Park the man on the bench next to me turns accusingly: “My wife thinks she knows you, it’s making her go insane.” The man at the bar wants to play a guessing game.

I start shouting out roles. I am now auditioning for the man at the bar. Fast Times at Ridgemont High? Pauly Shore is Dead? Fresh Prince of Bel-Air?

Anything?

The demographic that is most the stunning is the number of fans I have in the homeless population. One friendly guy who lives near me in a cluster of garbage cans always high-fives me because I was in The River’s Edge.

I love that guy. Because we are both That Guys.

But my heyday is coming to an end. Parts for the alternative everyman are increasingly scarce. I have had to let go of my dream of being in a Hobbit movie. This will never happen unless Bilbo Baggins orders a pizza and we all know that when a hobbit orders a pizza in Middle Earth, someone is going down a wet, nasty, dirty hole and as I would say if I were in a buddy cop movie: “I am getting too old for this jazz.”

I don’t miss Hollywood.

In truth I am quite content never having to “walk the red carpet” because I get to walk down something even more exotic: the black carpet.

After all these years of movies and TV shows, it is quite consistently the good and warm people of the TSA who treat me as a star.

They know my name at airport security, and as they rotate me in that high-tech security salad spinner those government employees do imitations of me. And as they frisk me for fluids and list my credits out loud it makes me feel worthwhile and wanted, like Norma Desmond at the end of Sunset Blvd.

I look at my alternative everyman predicament this way. By letting go of what you thought was going to happen in your life, you can enjoy what is actually happening.

That is what I do.

I’m That Guy.

Taylor Negron was an actor in numerous films and TV shows, including Friends, Seinfeld, ER, Stuart Little, Punchline, and Easy Money. This article originally appeared on xoJane.com.

Faith is supposed to be inclusive, but flip it on its head and terrible things result

Anyone who has ever played on a team knows the thrill of rooting for your own side’s success while rejoicing at your opponents’ losses. Now ratchet up that gratifying feeling with two other ingredients: an unwavering belief in a vengeful God, and a sense of injury stemming from feeling like a reviled, hard-done-by outsider, and you have some of the precursors of the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

Clearly, the murders are not remotely justifiable. At the same time, such violence is not haphazard. Combine extreme religion’s blinders with social ostracism, then season with the testosterone-driven aggressive impulses often found among disaffected young men and you can end up with a lethal stew.

What’s the evidence? Time and again, social psychology experiments have shown that ordinary people can be spurred to commit horrific acts of cruelty. Giving them authority over arbitrarily defined transgressors can prompt brutality, as the Stanford Prison Experiment—in which students were assigned to playact the roles of either guards or prisoners—showed in the 1970s. Persuading them that outsiders are less than human can disable their natural powers of empathy. Priming religious believers with passages showing that God endorses revenge against malefactors is dangerously effective, too.

In 2007, the Michigan social scientist, Brad Bushman, led a study of nearly 500 students, half of whom were Mormons studying at Brigham Young University; the other half were mostly secular students enrolled at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. All were given a violent passage to read that was said to be taken directly from scripture, or alternately, from an unidentified “ancient scroll.” Depicting the rape of a married woman traveling in a foreign region with her husband, the passage sometimes included a sentence in which God commands acts of revenge against the rapists’ foreign tribe. There was no mention of retribution in the passage read by the control group—a subset of the total 500, who were equally likely to be American or Dutch.

Next, all of the participants competed on a task in which the winner could blast the loser with a painfully loud noise through headphones. Who were the most aggressive blasters? More often than not they were the students—both American and Dutch—who identified themselves as fervent believers. They were also most likely to have been shown a passage of what they were told was scripture—rather than an ancient scroll—and to have read about God’s desire for violent retribution. Oh, and these students were also more likely to be male.

Religious men, even ones who regularly read about deities sanctioning violence in their holy books, don’t usually feel the license to kill, of course. In fact, you might expect the opposite. After all, religious people are more likely to do good than other people. They volunteer and donate blood more often than non-believers. They give more money to charity. In most psychology experiments they are more generous and less dishonest than atheists, and in the real world, they commit fewer crimes and abuse illegal subtances less, too. In fact, in the majority of the 39 countries polled by a 2014 Pew study, people say that a belief in God is required to be a moral person. That opinion was most common in poor regions such as Central Asia, and West Africa. But 53 percent of Americans also agree that religious belief makes you more ethical.

So what’s going on? The Parisian terrorists were devout, and like all major religions, Islam espouses the Golden Rule. Why didn’t that stop them from killing?

Part of the answer is that while religion is exquisitely designed to bind people together, enabling them to trust and protect each other, denigrating outsiders can be the flip side of that trust—and that denigration can snuff out empathy fast. Now, brain imaging studies tell us that witnessing bad things happen to those outsiders can make people feel powerful and superior.

Michael Inzlicht at the University of Toronto recently demonstrated that finding by arbitrarily dividing participants into two groups he named “the reds” and “the blues.” The “red” group was shown a video of a model performing certain rituals. After watching the model bow, turn around, and put her hands together, the members of the red group were asked to perform those movements at home for a week. The gestures meant nothing but could serve as a proxy for religious rituals—which have profound meaning to practitioners. The blues had no rituals.

The two groups then played a trust game, and Inzlicht found that the ritualizing “reds” distrusted the nonritualizing outgroup much more than they had before. Not only that, but a subsequent EEG showed that when the blues received negative feedback, the reds showed brain activity consistent with experiencing pleasure. “When they observed the outgroup member getting punished, they enjoyed their misfortunes,” said Prof. Inzlicht.

Now, consider that the perpetrators of last week’s horrifying violence felt excluded by French society—and found their place in an echo chamber of other angry, disenfranchised, and aggressive young men. Add the pain of rejection—which brain imaging studies show can actually be experienced as real, visceral pain—and you get a tinderbox of explosive feelings: A powerful desire to escape a marginalized social situation; to gain a sense of belonging and status by acting as enforcers of a religion’s sacred values; to earn the approval of charismatic religious leaders who incite them to punish “transgressors;”and finally, to experience the anticipated pleasure of witnessing the outsider’s pain.

The terrorists made a choice. It wasn’t rational—even if they believed it was. It certainly wasn’t moral. But their dark minds still merit our study. Understanding the psychology behind their religious blinders is as critical to democracy as condemning their actions.

Susan Pinker is a psychologist and award-winnning writer whose last book, The Sexual Paradox, was published in 17 countries. Her most recent book is The Village Effect.

Soraya Chemaly is a media critic and activist.

The response isn’t about toilets, but about women demanding more than they are “given”

Last week, many people took time out of their busy schedules to tell me I was a moron, should shut up, and should learn to urinate like a man. These suggestions, ranging from irritable to misogynistic and violent, came in response to an article I wrote for TIME about the history and politics of women waiting in line for public toilets. In an effort to better understand opposing points of view, I’ve categorized the objections into 10 themes:

1. Women should learn to stand, commonly understood to be a superior method of elimination. Many people even pointed me to helpful products. The argument goes that women should stand to overcome their “inferior biology,” whereas men sitting “like women” is emasculating—even though 30% of men surveyed prefer sitting. After millions of sit-to-pee gadgets were sold in Germany and people in Sweden started teaching boys to “be a sweetie and take a seatie,” there was a backlash among men in Britain and the United States lamenting the end of men. If you think women standing is “empowering” but men sitting is emasculating, tell the U.S. Navy, which eliminated urinals on aircraft carriers in 2012.
2. Women may have to wait in lines, but men’s rooms are disgusting. However true, this objection is irrelevant to women disproportionately waiting in long lines. And there are efforts to clean up men’s bathrooms. In Taiwan, Japan, and Sweden, there are public health initiatives for men to sit because standing is less sanitary and less healthy, and urinals take longer to clean and come at greater public cost.
3. Women should stop preening in front of the mirror. I could find no studies that measure this stereotype. However, several consumer surveys found that men spend more time grooming in general. In any case, women aren’t standing in lines for mirrors, but for stalls.
4. Women should stop going to the toilet together. In many countries, including ours, girls are frequently socialized to go to bathrooms with others because they have to be ever vigilant about avoiding rape. In point of fact, young boys, sexually assaulted just as frequently, should be taught precautions too. Instead, rape myths maintain that boys can’t be raped, so we put them at higher risk and mock girls for “staying safe.”
5. Your female opinion must be dismissed. Many people didn’t read the article, concluding that I was saying, for example, that “peeing standing up is sexist.” They saw the word “sexism,” and responded with a profusion of unimaginative gendered slurs, like “dumb b**ch.”
6. Stop lying. Among the rebuttals I received were: “No woman breastfeeds in public restrooms,” and “How can you say women stand in lines more than men?” Yet there is an entire campaign to raise awareness about women breastfeeding in public restrooms. As for men waiting in lines: yes, this happens, most often in places where there are comparably few women (e.g., Silicon Valley or the military).
7. This isn’t “the battle that feminism should be focused on.” The issue here is a centrally important one: we need to understand and stop perpetuating discriminatory norms developed when women had almost no legal rights and were largely barred from contributing to defining culture. This basic problem is as true in the law, medicine, and media as it is in the design of public spaces.
8. Stop “being a victim” because “no one is making women wait in line.” Unfortunately, women can’t actually walk away from the bodily-fluid-filled reality of our lives, including leaking breast milk, seeping blood, or bladders possibly being crushed by pregnancy. Pointing out this reality no more makes a woman a victim than if a man describes a problem with the low height of stroller handles.
9. This is the result of biology, so deal with it. As one person on Twitter put it, “biology doesn’t design toilets.” It matters that people who do not have these concerns make up the vast majority of legislators, the foreign service, our military, and humanitarian aid decision makers. Women’s input and meeting women’s basic physical and safety needs are important, and incorporating them would mean more effective solutions to everything from urban design that includes better sanitary facilities to disaster relief to environmental policies.
10. This is a “first world problem” because “women in the middle east (sic) are getting acid thrown in their faces after they’ve been raped” and “men go to war.” These issues are global ones, as India’s “Right to Pee” campaign, and China’s “Occupy Men’s Toilets” protest illustrate. Setting aside the implied dismissal of egregious gender-based violence in the United States, which is firmly in the middle of the global pack, women do suffer gravely elsewhere, including, notably, from having no safe access to sanitary facilities. Even in our recent past, this problem has inhibited girls’ ability to attend school and women’s ability to work. It contributes to illness and exacerbates poverty. In disasters, our inability to plan for women’s bodily needs results in higher mortality rates for girls and women. As for war, militarism is directly linked to gender inequality and sex segregation.

All of this in response to the simple question of why women are still not having their basic needs equitably met. During the past three decades, laws focused on “Potty Parity,” an infantilizing term redolent with Victorian shame, have been passed in the United States, and yet the problem persists. Increasingly, as the result of effective LGTBQ activism, communities are developing organic and often hybrid solutions, including gender-neutral bathrooms, that more equitably address everyone’s needs. If Viennese urban planners have done it for their city, surely we can do it for our public toilets?

Outraged people, employing ad hominem attacks, suggested I’d posited a “conspiracy,” and were particularly put out by the word “sexism,” something they associate with an individual’s explicitly intended discriminatory behavior. So why such virulent responses to an article about reducing women’s wait times and recounting history? The response isn’t about toilets but about when women—and other historically marginalized people—demand more than they are “given” and stop quietly accepting historically permissible marginalization in the public sphere.

Read next: The Everyday Sexism of Women Waiting in Public Toilet Lines

The joke didn’t belong at a show where Asian Americans are virtually absent

If you’re going to make a rape joke, you’re going to also have to prove that you care

After Tina Fey and Amy Poehler made their series of Bill Cosby jokes at Sunday night’s Golden Globe awards show—jokes at which I laughed—I thought, “Well, they’re in for it.” If you’re going to make a rape joke, you expect to hear about it.

Before we get into Fey and Poehler, let’s take a moment to consider some not funny rape jokes. Back in 2012, comedian Daniel Tosh made a joke about replacing his sister’s pepper spray with silly string. That same year, James Franco joked about being raped by Seth Rogen: “[He] forced his way into my dressing room, blew pot smoke into my mouth, pinned me beneath his sweaty, heaving, schlubby body.”

No, I don’t think Daniel Tosh would actually do that to his sister, but the fact that #yesallwomen can probably viscerally imagine the sensation of going to defend themselves and finding that impossible is not funny, at all. As for Franco: Dude. Being an “intellectual” doesn’t mean you’re incapable of sounding like a homophobic a**hole.

Back to Poehler and Fey. Let’s begin with the first part of their two-part Bill Cosby joke: “Sleeping Beauty just thought she was getting coffee with Bill Cosby.” It is typical awards show fare that incorporates the theme of the evening (movies) with current events (Cosby). It takes another step by combining a children’s story heroine with a beloved star and household name accused of drugging and sexually assaulting women. There is something funny about imagining Sleeping Beauty getting coffee with Bill Cosby, because you don’t think of them being together, and then—wait a minute—if Sleeping Beauty was your daughter, you would not let her go anywhere with Bill Cosby, because Bill Cosby is not to be trusted…not even with a fictional character. Yes, the foolishly innocent Sleeping Beauty suffers a little here, but her foolish innocence needs to be there to laugh—albeit bitterly—at Cosby’s evil deceit.

Now the best part of that joke, actually, might be the fact that we thought that was the end of it. “Ok, we went there, and yes, Jessica Chastain got very upset, but it’s over now.” But it wasn’t.

Fey started things up again, saying that Bill Cosby had finally spoken out about allegations against him. Then, in a cartoonishly bad imitation of Cosby’s voice, she exploded with: “I put the pills in the people, the people did not want the pills in them!” Poehler shook her head and in a chastising manner said, “No, Tina. Ok, Tina that’s not right. That’s not right,” and Fey looked a little ashamed. Then Poehler said, “It’s more like: “I got the pills in the bathrobe and I put them in the people!” Fey nodded, both satisfied and a touch rueful at having been bested and said, “You’re right, it’s gotta be like ‘I put the pill in the hoagie,’” and Poehler nods, “Yeah. That’s it.” Then they both muttered to themselves, “That’s fair. That’s fair.”

After Fey’s first imitation, we thought we were going to see a sort of a faux debate about the appropriateness of the subject. The fact that the question wasn’t about whether it was permissible to make fun of the Cosby rapes but merely what was the best way to do so was awesome. The fact that what they were debating was which of their enthusiastic but hackneyed Bill Cosby imitations was better was genius. The joke anticipated its backlash and told viewers, “We so don’t care if this is appropriate or going too far that we’re going to incorporate a joke about the very notion of that bullshit into our joke.”

It also let those watching in on the way that comedians tend to think about the things we think are sacred: “If we can find a way to make this awful thing that no one thinks is funny funny, we’re going to do it, because that’s just what we do.” Finally, the muttering to themselves at the end, the attempt to convince themselves that what they’d done was OK, even though they were really going out on the edge, showed that they didn’t think they were uttering these words in a vacuum. They were aware of the consequences and the criticism, and they were going to do it anyway.

If you’re going to make a rape joke, you’re going to also have to prove that you care, that there’s something at stake here for you. With Tosh and Franco, I just see two dudes hoping that being offensive will do the work required to make something funny so that they themselves don’t have to. But Poehler and Fey—accused by some of getting away with this because they’re women—have an actual target. They are attacking a man who refuses—other than with his own stunningly terrifying joke—to discuss or acknowledge his 32 accusers.

Now of course the question remains, what about Cosby’s victims? Would these jokes have been hurtful to them? My guess is some of the women would hate the jokes, and some of them would have loved them. So should the jokes not have been made so as to spare the feelings of those who would have hated them?

To ignore the accusations against Cosby at Hollywood’s most irreverent public event would have been to surround his alleged crimes with even more silence, and that doesn’t seem like a great option. (Interestingly, Cosby was very well imitated, and skewered, in Season 3 of 30 Rock, by Rick from accounting.) There’s nothing funny about rape and there’s nothing funny about being raped. But there is something funny, there just is, about two women leading an entire nation to laugh in the face of a man who’s been accused by 32 women of sexual assault and thinks maybe ignoring it will make it go away. There is always a risk of a joke offending someone, but politeness in the face of cruelty, well, there’s nothing more offensive than that.

Sarah Miller also writes for NewYorker.com and The Hairpin, among other outlets, and has published two novels, Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn and The Other Girl.

xoJane.com is where women go to be their unabashed selves, and where their unabashed selves are applauded

"Unless you're taking steps to change the system, I'm not interested in how sorry you are"

Last week, Lorenzo Dalpani, the CEO of Revlon, was exposed for saying racist, anti-Semitic remarks and of course, the black women of Twitter had a field day, myself included. The hashtag #ShadesOfRevlon was a satiric spin on how popular lipstick shades could be renamed to bastardize black and Jewish cultures, especially the darker side of their histories, such as systemic oppression.

I admit that I laughed for a few hours at the tweets, but once the gaiety subsided, I realized just how cyclical this process was for minorities. We laugh in order to restrain our pain and embarrassment at being belittled by people in power once again. Black women alone spend 80% more on cosmetics and twice as much on skin care products and yet we are still mocked in the boardrooms of these companies to which we give our hard-earned money.

The cycle begins just like this:

Step 1: The exposé. A white person in power is finally called out for their years of abuse on people of color. Countless media outlets circulate the story and get in contact with the victims or whoever outed the story.

Step 2: Satire on Twitter. Whenever Black people on Twitter hear about said story and get offended by it (because, let’s face it, they usually are the second-hand victims of these stories), they subvert their anger into hilarious hashtags that in turn give journalists something else to write about. Their companies get more ad revenue and money in their pockets.

Step 3: The apology. The white person in power apologizes and promises to make amends. Maybe even like the Revlon CEO, he will get sued. Although, what’s a million to someone who owns a billion dollar company?

Step 4: He or she lays low for a while.

Step 5: The return. Like the phoenix emerging from the ashes, the person comes back into prominence after some “soul searching.”

You and I have seen this all before and frankly, I am tired of it. I am exhausted of my sympathy for these cyclical occurrences from Don Lemon to Paula Deen to Lorenzo Dalpani because the formula is the same. Let’s call a spade a spade. None of these people are genuinely sorry for what they have done. They are sorry for being caught because this exposure may put a dent into their pockets and invite a whirlwind of bad publicity (if you believe in bad publicity, to begin with).

Anyone who has been abusing minorities for years and mocking the people of the demographics that earn them the most money is not sorry. They hire top-notch public relations professionals so that they can clean up their messes and most come out of this media firestorm unscathed. This cycle continues to happen because there is nothing happening at the root level to thwart its repetition. The same formula yields the same output.

Now, to be fair, I do believe that any person can have a change of heart. But we must not dismiss the fact that these people have all the privilege and resources at their disposal to educate themselves and evidently, they did not choose to do so until they were forced by outside circumstances to do it.

So how do we remedy this situation? I know for certain that the reason why these white public figures make these insensitive remarks is because they are not aware. They are not aware that what they do and say hurts minorities. The easiest way to be aware of one’s differences vis a vis another’s is to be in the midst of them.

They need to surround themselves with more minorities, and not just the ones who cook their food, watch their children, and scrub their kitchen floors. More minorities need to be in the boardroom being heard and taken into consideration for their priceless cultural value to the company. Such a contribution is crucial in this generation, and it all starts with the hiring process. A white person with some high school education can get hired quicker than a black college graduate. If that discrepancy does not unsettle you just a little bit, then you may be also part of the problem.

We need these people in power to be aware. A boardroom should succeed in bringing in a diversity of talents and a diversity of people. One black or Asian person does not equal diversity. The hiring process needs to be changed. We as minorities cannot only be good enough for you to take our money, but not good enough to hire. We see the statistics and hear from unemployed people of color all the time. Minorities are applying but you are not taking them. Then, others wonder why CEOs and public figures alike make racist faux pas. I can guarantee you it’s because no minority was in their corners in order to tell them that they were making a big mistake.

In essence, we as the public need to hold these people accountable. Think pieces and hashtags are great catalysts for conversation, but their impact gets stunted if the people who need these lessons most do not read any of them.

I’ve heard the saying that the best place to hit a rich, privileged person where it hurts is in his or her pockets. But now, that’s not enough anymore. Let’s hurt their revenue and also reveal how dangerous their rhetoric is. If that means sending them books on critical race theory, inviting them on talk shows alongside scholars with minority interviewers, and having powerful people of color to bolster support, so be it.

We cannot allow these cycles to go on because all they do is reinforce a hierarchy. In the end, the minorities are the ones who still feel the sting when the story is old news. We may eventually move on from the topic, but that’s because another racist juggernaut is outed then the emotional wound deepens. Regardless, we never forget. Do not let them forget either.

Morgan Jerkins is a writer and graduate student. This article originally appeared on xoJane.com.

Zocalo Public Square is a not-for-profit Ideas Exchange that blends live events and humanities journalism.

I deeply hope that we can all live peacefully together in France. But I am a bit pessimistic

I just keep thinking, Oh my God — not Charlie Hebdo, not the magazine that made me laugh over the last 20 years. I had a knot in my stomach thinking it might have been done in the name of Islam. I wanted to be wrong so badly.

Sadly, I was not. I posted a picture my friends had been sharing that said, “Je suis Charlie.” I am Charlie.

I am a French woman, a Franco-Algerian woman. I was born and raised in France. but I grew up within an Algerian family attached to its roots. So the Charlie Hebdo shooting brought up complicated memories.

My father came to France in 1963, for economic reasons and freedom. He brought my mother in 1973, after they married. My siblings and I were all born here in France. My father was able to find an affordable apartment in one of the wealthier Parisian suburbs with good schools. He drove taxi cabs 11 hours a night, while my mom took care of us and other local kids.

I discovered some of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists who were killed when I was around 5 or 6. Jean Cabut — known as Cabu — collaborated with a children’s TV program; his drawings were always very funny, but tame, since the show was for children. When I was older and I discovered Stephane Charbonnier — known as Charb — his cartoon Maurice & Patapon — about a bisexual, anarchist dog infatuated with defecation and sex and a fascist, ultra-liberal cat that mocks the suffering of others — made me laugh so loud.

When I saw Charlie Hebdo cartoons about God and Muhammad, I must admit I found them funny and relevant. They also mocked other religions. I thought they had a right to publish them, though I was afraid of intense reactions in the French Muslim community.

I don’t practice Islam anymore, though my parents do. The Islam my parents know is tolerant, easy to practice. They pray God daily and fast during Ramadan. They even went to Mecca. But they never took me to the mosque, and my father never asked me to wear a hijab, the head covering for women. “We live in France, so we should live as French do, without committing any sin that Islam condemns,” he used to tell me.

In 1984, my parents decided to return to Algeria. They wanted us to learn Arabic and live according to our traditions. But then fundamentalist Islamic movements appeared. Some leaders of the Front Islamique du Salut, the Islamic party, started to call for terrorism in the name of God. Journalists, policemen, soldiers, women and students were killed. Mosque leaders told women they had to obey husbands and fathers. If we stayed, my parents thought my sister and I might end up as stay-at-home wives who were expected to shut their mouths. So, when I was 15, in 1990, we returned to Paris.

In France, God, faith, prayer, dogma are very private items. You’ll never hear a president talking about God or swear with a right hand on the Bible. The point is to guarantee the freedom of conscience and religion and to promote the idea of “vivre ensemble” — living together.

I deeply hope that we can all live peacefully together in France. But I am a bit pessimistic.

Being Muslim in France is hard. News reports have shown how difficult it is to find an apartment, if your name is Mohamed or Djamel, even if you have a great job, a high level of study, and a very correct French accent. The main victims of fundamentalist terrorism are regular Muslim people who only want to live in peace with their neighbors and to not have to apologize for acts they did not commit.

These nights, I am re-reading a book I’ve already read to my young children — Charb’s C’est Pas Là Qu’on Fait Caca (Here’s Where We Don’t Poop). I want them to grow up saying whatever they want and laughing at whatever they want, however rude. I believe that if God exists, he or she has a fabulous sense of humor.

Mounira El Barr Collin is a quality control manager living in Couilly Pont aux Dames, a village near Paris, with her husband and their two kids. They celebrate Christmas, as well as Aîd elkebir. She wrote this for Zocalo Public Square.

Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

From Sam Gosling’s book, Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You:

Arthur Aron, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is interested in how people form romantic relationships, and he’s come up with an ingenious way of taking men and women who have never met before and making them feel close to one another. Given that he has just an hour or so to create the intimacy levels that typically take week, months, or years to form, he accelerated the getting-to-know-you process through a set of thirty-six questions crafted to take the participants rapidly from level one in McAdams’s system to level two. The questions are part of an hour-long “sharing game” in which each member of a pair reads a question out loud and then they both answer it before moving on to the next question.

What are some of the questions?

1. Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?

2. Would you like to be famous? In what way?

3. Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?

4. What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?

5. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?

6. If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?

7. Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common.

8. For what in your life do you feel most grateful?

9. If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?

10. If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?

11. If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future, or anything else, what would you want to know?

12. Is there something that you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?

13. What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?

14. What do you value most in a friendship?

15. What is your most treasured memory?

16. What is your most terrible memory?

17. What does friendship mean to you?

18. What roles do love and affection play in your life?

19. How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people’s?

20. Complete this sentence:”I wish I had someone with whom I could share…”

21. If you were going to become a close friend with your partner, please share what would be important for him or her to know.

22. Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time saying things that you might not say to someone you’ve just met.

23. Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life.

24. When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?

25. Tell your partner something that you like about them already.

26. What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?

27. Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why?

Aron’s book is Handbook of Closeness and Intimacy.

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

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