Anita DeRouen

First, if you aren’t familiar with the concept of first, second, and third places (home, work/school, the social gathering spaces), watch this video wherein sociologist Ray Oldenberg explains the concept to you. This is an 18 minute lecture. There are no visual elements. You can just listen and you won’t have to listen to all of it to get the general gist.

Now, Oldenburg here is arguing for and focusing in on the third place–the shared social space–and he pooh poohs the idea of the virtual community as a viable third place. I think that his 2013 assessment does not hold up as well in July 2020, but I’m gonna put a pin in that for now because I want to think about the space that he doesn’t talk about: the second one. Work-place. School-place. The places where the majority of us spend our waking/working hours.

We can’t use these second places right now, not in the way we want to; individuals and institutions are grappling with our expectation that these second places are just always available to us and are baseline containers for what we do in those working/learning hours.

The second place is now deadly. It is a disease transmission vector at a scale at which it hasn’t been ever in our modern world. The ability to earn/learn while hunkering down in the first place (home) is increasingly a marker of economic privilege.

The second place is also, I suspect, expensive. It is the physical home of the work/learn function in our society. Think about where you work or go to school–the place. What is the value of the physical property–the buildings, the underlying structural elements, the greenspaces, the actual land itself? What is cost/value of the labor associated with building, maintaining, securing, and facilitating the use of these places? How much skin in the game does an institution have in these physical spaces, and how does that factor into their calculations about when, if, and how these places became/become physically active again?

The second place is also a container for human bodies. It is the structure in which we do our “work”–be that the work we do to earn money to pay for our first place and our third place activities or the work that we do to eventually be able to do the work that pays. The school provides the place to contain the small bodies that are attached to the larger bodies that must go to work.

If the school is dangerous and not accessible–and third places are not as appealing when we are really safest (in a virus-avoidance sense) in our first places–where do we safely contain and monitor the small bodies? How does that impact the workplace-as-container? What percentage of the square footage associated with second places–and all of the attendant support features of those places noted above–will not be needed in the short term? How might we shift in the long term? And, again–how do these human economics factor into decision making on the part of the owners of the second places, particularly pre-, primary, secondary, and alternative schooling environments that are under pressure to contain those small bodies? At what rate of infection and/or death of teachers/staff/students do we as a society go back to the second place drawing board?

I have to work to make money to pay for my first place, so I’ll be heading to my second place and my son will be heading to his to the extent that we are required to. And I recognize that I haven’t even touched on the second spaces that are deemed essential to the maintenance of the first spaces. The paradigm is shifting.

I have a coffee mug problem. Ask my housemate, ask my office mates–ask my son. They’ll tell you that the coffee mugs proliferate like rabbits in our quarters. I want to say that I don’t buy them all, that most are gifts or swag, but that would be a liar’s lie. I just like them and when I see one that I like, I acquire it.

The mugs speak to me and speak my mood. They mark the season of the year. They warn people away. They inspire. They aspire. They are my freak flag, and I let it fly.

By now you are expecting to see, no doubt, a photo gallery of mugs. My mugs are not here to meet your expectations. They will show themselves when ready.

Since I’m visiting family for the holidays, I don’t have my usual mug palette from which to choose, but this is of no consequence today. On this day, the first day of a new year, I had the pleasure of sipping the first cup of coffee from this favorite that I never remember to bring back to Jackson with me.

A bit of wisdom as I go into the new year: let it be. The old. The vexing. The triumph. The failure. The painful. The joyful. Let it be in the past. Let the present be in the present. Let the future hang out with itself. *

I am in my fiftieth year on this planet. On the 28th of September, I will mark the end of that year and the start of the fifty-first. These numbers should be panic-inducing, but when I look at them as words I find it much easier to let them be and to walk into this year being me.

I’ve put on my habit for the year, so to speak. Let it be. Let myself be me.

*A few other messages to myself from this photo: Knit warm hats. Make more gumbo. Take the bear to NYC. Write. Play cards. Don’t forget to do the dishes.

Yesterday I shared some reactions to the predictable reactions to the results in Mississippi’s recent US Senate runoff. I was frustrated–am frustrated–by the holier-than-thou attitudes demonstrated by some outside of the South (and, if I’m honest, within as well) about Mississippi. Some of the commentary, I dare say, would put one in the mind of Donald Trump’s question about whether or not Mike Espy even “fit” the state of Mississippi. Does Mississippi “fit” the United States?

I would argue–have argued–that it not only does fit the US but that it is the US. Mississippi is the United States of America in the most sublime and ridiculous of ways. Out of our pain has come some of the most American artistic creations and we have taken pleasure in our role in some of America’s cruelest moments. I may be unpacking that last statement for a while on these here interwebs, but I’m going to let it sit there for now. I, like Mississippi, take my time.

Friends and colleagues shared my little commentary yesterday. Several folks thanked me for putting into words what they’d been thinking about but couldn’t quite articulate. Others thanked me for just putting down words that had meaning and gave them some sustenance or comfort. And some, inevitably, pushed back, although they didn’t do so in this space, but chose to express their suspicion of my emotional motivations.

I have a chip on my shoulder. I’m defensive. I’m not being fair to other less awful parts of the US.

I will be the first to point to Mississippi’s peculiarity with regard to the legacy of racism in this country. I distinctly recall that, in the Spring of 2010, I told a class of students that I’d never felt my blackness the way that I feel it in Mississippi. I stand by that statement all these years later. Being in Mississippi, however, was just what my bull-headed self needed to experience to finally recognize what I’d been seeing and resisting for so long in all of my dealings with the world outside of Mississippi. Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee.

I stand by what I said yesterday, too: Mississippi doesn’t exist to be a dumping ground for the nation’s dismay and anger that racism still exists. Mississippi can’t be the scapegoat for our national sin. To make Mississippi the scapegoat means that we abandon those in Mississippi–who are like others all over this world–fighting for a more perfect union, and it makes it easier to do a little bit less than we can do because there’s nothing to be done about Mississippi.

If Mississippi can do what it did yesterday, Mississippi can–with time and support and encouragement–do all of the things so many of us want it to do.

Everybody is singing “Mississippi, Goddamn” today, rolling out their progressive bona fides and dunking on this state in the aftermath of yesterday’s US Senate run-off election. Mike Espy, a black man who had the audacity to run against the appointed representative of Mississippi caucasity, Cindy Hyde-Smith, lost. A nation’s two-week-old hopes for change in the state Most Likely to Show Up in a Hoop Skirt to Obama’s Inauguration were dashed by the (predictable) voters in this most racist swamp backwater. The narrative wheel rolls on.

I’m tired of this sheepfold bleating. I’ve lived in Mississippi for over ten years now, in the Deep South for my whole life. One thing that I know about white folks in the South is that as long as they have someone considered lesser than themselves, they can hold their heads high in a shack with cardboard covered windows or peer down judgmentally from their four-door pickup trucks or sneer from their compact and energy efficient hatchbacks. They can hold their heads high and vote over and over and over again for the white man (or woman, in this case) who will let them keep feeling like they are better than something.

It’s never stated that overtly in our modern discourse, although lately the veneer of egalitarianism is wearing dangerously thin. This nation elected–not once, mind you, but twice–an educated, smooth, beautifully made black man and his beautiful black family to be the nearest thing we have to royalty in this country, and the response to that was both a national sigh of relief that we had “slipped loose the surly bonds” of our racist past and a rude awakening to the knowledge that the racists were still inside–had always been inside–the house.

And so we got the Tea Party and Sarah Palin and the ratcheting up of the Fox News/right wing propaganda machine and the poison spread from one node on the system to another until we got the current resident of the White House, who has clearly made it his mission to erase any vestiges of the black folks that sullied that space (the government it represents) by daring to sleep in the beds instead of making them.

You feeling good about yourself yet? Self-righteous because you aren’t one of them? Shaking your head about those cretins in Mississippi/Georgia/Florida/Texas/Cloudcukooland who keep on showing how awful they are by electing people like Trump and Hyde-Smith and Cruz and on and on and on?

That–that right there–is a HUGE part of the problem.

No, I’m not going to argue that we have to reach across the aisle and play nice with Nazis. I’m not a fatalist. I am going to hold a mirror up to you, though, and remind you that you are not that far away from your own Mississippi, that Mississippi has been a fundamental part of this nation from its inception, that when you woke up on the morning of November 9, 2016 you realized that you’d been living in Mississippi all along.

Mississippi does not need your scorn and your mockery and your derision. Mississippi does not exist to be your political punching bag to help salve your wounded progressive soul. Your violent behavior toward Mississippi is just your misplaced anger and ire in the face of what you’ve known all along: that this nation is deeply racist, fundamentally so.

There are no magic bullets. Y’all got all excited about Espy’s chances after what you perceived as a less-than-satisfying narrative conclusion to the mid-term elections. You wanted a big symbolic win because you believe in Hallmark card fairy tales where people make enormous changes to their beliefs and behaviors when presented with a bit of holiday magic.

You can’t have that. Black folks, in particular, have known the truth of that in this country all along, but y’all are just waking up to that reality. Change takes time and work and hope. Obama tried to tell y’all (and Obama wasn’t a saint, but that’s a story for another day), but y’all were too enthralled with his basketball playing and Biden Bromance to listen.

So lay off Mississippi, OK? While you’re humming along with Nina, start replacing the names of those southern landmarks with ones more local to you and get used to feeling how well that shoe fits so many places in this nation. Mississippi is everywhere.