One Black eighth grader was in the middle of pleading against her school's potential closure when Allyson Friedmans’ voice, unmuted on the call, boomed through. “They’re too dumb to know they’re in a bad school,” said Friedman, an associate professor of biological sciences at CUNY Hunter College, where 11.5% of the undergraduate students are Black. “I mean, apparently Martin Luther King said it, like if you train a Black person well enough, they'll know to use the back, you don't have to tell them anymore."

From time to time, someone decides to resurrect the same debate about 500 Days of Summer (2009): was Summer the villain, or was Tom simply delusional? The response to that question rarely changes. Summer is perceived as a cold, evasive witch who purposely misleads poor Tom, while Tom is defended as a romantic, perhaps naive, but well-intentioned good guy. The framing of that narrative is quite unsurprising, almost expected, because it provides the natural urge to assign fault cleanly; a way to make sense of a dramatic, romantic split by assigning one person the role of the wrongdoer and the other the role of the one wronged.

Real commitment used to lead to milestones. A marriage, a mortgage, a job, a new city. These were all declarations, not just one-off choices or premeditated decisions. Today, permanence feels less like security and more like risk: to our identity, our autonomy, our finances, even our sense of self—especially as a woman who has been told both to settle and to have it all.

Fair warning, this essay is not nostalgic for compulsory marriage or shrinking yourself to fit into someone else’s script.

The 2000s ushered in a progressive discussion on gender and sexual orientation and has since challenged social signifiers of what it means to be a man. It has thrown confusion into a vat of insecurity for those whose identity rests in material, surface level traits. In an effort to combat this, conservatives have reclaimed antique signifiers to masculinity; manliness has been pushed to the extreme. Any hint of emotionalism, the acceptance of women as equals, or physical weakness is considered a betrayal to the inherently ‘masculine.’

Inside a community center at Allentown, Pennsylvania, the Working Families Party (WFP) organized a watch party for the Super Bowl half time show for groups of migrant families—only one of many around the country. The air was heavy with anxieties of a possible ICE raid as people huddled around one screen to watch a great American artist perform. This is not an excerpt from Orwell’s 1984, or a 21st century fiction retelling of World War II. This was two weeks ago in the U.S.