Editor’s Note: Read an interview with Elaine Hsieh Chou about her writing process.

Gene called them his good-day-bad-day bagels. When he was having a good day, he’d allow himself a bagel, and when he was having a bad day, he’d also allow himself a bagel. How he landed on bagels was a matter of both convenience and health: New York had no shortage of them and doughnuts upset his blood sugar. But bagels, on the other hand—they possessed an inoffensive, neutral quality. The problem was he sometimes swerved between good and bad so frequently that he ended up consuming three bagels before dinner. Though Gene believed in waiting until the end of the day before declaring it one or the other—sticking a nice, firm label beneath it—waiting defeated the purpose of an immediate, edible consequence.

Gene measured out every moment of his life into a series of punishments and rewards. If he missed the subway right when the doors pinched shut, he let himself forgo eye contact with the homeless woman jiggling her paper cup. If he skipped the subway fare because a charitable stranger had propped the door open, his punishment (awful to consider it punishment, he knew) amounted to giving her a dollar along with the eye contact.

Mentally taxing to approach life like a bank account, a nonstop escalator of fluctuating numbers, yet he found comfort in it. A system of measurements to keep himself on the straight moral path because he couldn’t always keep it straight in his mind—this was his self-prescribed treatment.

Today, the day he took the N train from Astoria and boarded the bus on East 39th and Second, he’d tallied zero ups and two downs, meaning he was allowed two ups: an everything bagel with green-onion cream cheese (he counted them separately; he didn’t like to cheat the system). At the bodega, he’d considered ordering a second bagel, because today—surely, today of all days?—he would have reason to celebrate.

He opened his brown paper bag as Napoleon sank into the seat beside him. “My doctor said I have the heart of a 60-year-old,” Napoleon said by way of hello. Given that Napoleon had turned 60 last month, Gene offered no response, instead politely listened as he denounced the toxicity of Western medicine. Napoleon interpreted Gene’s silence as a reproach. “What’s with you?”

“Nothing,” Gene lied. “My stomach hurts.”

Napoleon rummaged through his satchel, a fake Louis Vuitton, and produced a bottle of Po Chai pills. “Take two of these. With lukewarm—not cold—water.”

Gene waved him away. “I’m fine.”

“Suit yourself.” Napoleon zipped his satchel back up and eyed Gene’s paper bag. “What do you got there?” Gene reluctantly admitted to the everything bagel as Napoleon closed his eyes. “I haven’t eaten since last night. We wrapped at four in the morning. I took a nap on the 6, didn’t even have time to go home and shower—”

Gene handed the bagel over.

“You sure you don’t want any?” Napoleon said, already tearing through the wax paper.

“I’m sure.” Gene meant to ask how bagels fit into Napoleon’s anti-Western cleanse, but was distracted by a familiar face boarding the bus—a woman he’d once been paired with as a couple at a fancy Szechuan restaurant in the Lower East Side. He turned in his seat and recognized more faces before the vertigo of familiarity was heightened by a new realization: Everyone present had been selected because, from a blurred distance, they could be related.

Napoleon noticed too. “I bet you it’s a Japanese World War II movie.”

Napoleon (his parents had named him with misguided hopes) played ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT while Gene played UPSCALE LAWYER. How their respective identities factored into this casting decision (Napoleon being a little more South to Gene’s East) was understood but left unspoken by both men. Standing in line to get propped—Gene with his shiny briefcase, Napoleon with a soiled cardboard sign—Napoleon had offered to lift Gene up. Napoleon’s shortcut to making friends was lifting people up, including the 6-foot-3 man who played SECURITY GUARD, somehow stunned and satisfied each time he managed it.

Gene continued to run into Napoleon on set, not unusual when few background actors shared their narrow demographic. Without having exchanged numbers once, Gene suspected he was on more intimate terms with Napoleon’s catalog of health problems than Napoleon’s full-time friends were—one of the perks, or pits, of the job: endless hours to kill when the only weapon around was small talk. But the transitory nature of these interactions was also their beauty, which freed you up to confess more than you’d otherwise dare because after 12 consecutive hours together, you’d simply say, “Nice talking to you,” and never see each other again. You walked off with others’ confessions and they with yours, safe in the degrees of separation that stretched between you.

Gene had been doing background for two years. When asked how he’d gotten into it (a stock question extras passed around between takes), he would say he’d always been interested in acting, and wasn’t a late start better than none? That wasn’t entirely true, though. Actually, it wasn’t true at all. He’d signed up to do background because of his daughter, Athena. Like Napoleon’s parents, Gene had named her with hopes she’d achieve magnificence, and then, to his bewilderment, she did: Winner of the Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Nominated for Best Narrative Feature at SXSW. Premiered at Sundance Film Festival.

He once looked up her biography: “Athena Wu is a writer and director. The daughter of immigrants, her work interrogates the intersection of race, sex, and violence. She lives in Los Angeles.”

“The daughter of immigrants.” He read the line twice to make sure he hadn’t hallucinated it. That she had taken on her mother’s maiden name was bad enough, but what had compelled her to lie? Like Athena, Gene had been born in Michigan; they’d moved to New York when she was 5. He’d grown up in an industrial town on the outskirts of Detroit, pretty painlessly, all things considered. He had plenty to be grateful for, all things considered. But Athena—she refused to acknowledge that her accomplishments, all the awards and fellowships and titles, had been made possible through an unbroken line of others’ suffering. And yet in her “body of work,” Athena never failed to adopt their suffering as her own. If such a thing as a surrogate of misery existed, that was his daughter.

How to explain he was terrified of her? Not just terrified but puzzled he’d had any involvement in her upbringing, let alone her existence. In an interview, when asked why she’d gone into filmmaking, Athena had responded, “I’ve always been interested in controlling my environment. I guess you could say it was an affect developed in childhood.” The last line had made him squint sideways at his phone.

Gene wasn’t an ambitious man himself—he looked for meaning in the hours spent clocked out of his job more than in the job itself, which was, at the moment, driving part-time for Uber. He and his cousin split custody of a slate-blue Toyota Camry; he had the weekends and his cousin, the weekdays. He rented out the second floor of a duplex from a young couple, a painful reminder he had yet to achieve the kind of financial security his daughter enjoyed.

He led a noiseless life, though it was a little lonely and monotonous, true. But doing background, he’d been a NASA scientist, a doctor, and a UN ambassador without having to train for any of it. For as long as he could remember, Gene had had trouble staying loyal to a single objective. When Athena was younger, he’d been a security-desk attendant, a truck driver for a restaurant-supplies company, and a maintenance-crew member, just to name a few. In between jobs, he’d participated in paid surveys about products he could never afford and swallowed clinical-trial pills his nonexistent health insurance could never cover. He’d had no time to tend to a “career.”

But Athena—she’d always known what she wanted. Barely in second grade and already arranging her toys in elaborate three-act stories. Other little girls wanted dolls or clothes; his daughter had coveted a Sony camcorder with infrared night vision. Other daughters were devoted to or at least tolerant of their fathers; his had abandoned him when he needed her the most.

The bus squeaked onto 495 and spat them out in Long Island, at an immense studio Gene hadn’t known existed. All these years and New York kept pulling scarves out of its hat, discount-magician-style. He could never come to grips with the city, which thrived on chaos rather than order. But maybe that was why he stayed. The city was forgiving, built on second and third and fourth chances.

In the parking lot, everyone stretched, yawned, and obediently shuffled in the direction of neon-pink signs pointing to holding—a demoralizing room with 10 fans in lieu of functioning AC. Nonunion’s breakfast was already waiting on warming trays: scrambled eggs, sausage patties, bacon, pancakes, and home fries. On an adjacent table were juice boxes and packaged snacks. The granola bars were always pocketed in seconds. Gene had forgotten this and by the time he wandered over, only unsalted peanuts greeted him.

“Decent spread.”

Gene looked up. Napoleon had sauntered in with his SAG-exclusive breakfast, served upstairs: eggs Benedict, shrimp cocktail, sliced avocado, and a salacious chocolate muffin.

“Didn’t want to eat with them,” he sneered, though Gene didn’t understand why since he never let anyone forget he was SAG. “Where’s the line for SAG?” “Sorry to cut, I’m SAG.” “Is SAG getting bused home?” Another point docked off.

Gene took a bite of flaccid pancake as the first AD swept into the room, his movements so frenetic that the NDAs fluttered in their piles on the conference tables.

Gene waited for “Janek but you can call me Jack” to speak. He did not. To Gene’s amusement, Jack waited until all the NDAs were signed and collected before opening his mouth. From that moment on, the extras were bound to silence.

“Okay, so _________ happens over the course of 24 hours. It’s made up of three vignettes, each one based around a different __________ in New York. I said vignette, not vinaigrette.”

Most of the time, nobody on set bothered to explain anything to them. Most of the time, they were herded around like blind children. On the rare occasions explanations were offered, the film was either big-budget or art-house.

“And our eyes and ears, __________, he’s the thread that connects them all. You still with me? Okay, so today we’re shooting three scenes.” Disappointment dribbled through the room. “I know, I know, it’s going to be a long day, but trust me, we want to get you out of here as fast as we can.” Translation: We don’t want to pay you a cent more than we have to.

Someone raised her hand. Jack pretended not to see.

“So in this vignette, everything takes place on a ______________. In the first scene, it’s a normal day. You’re all waiting for the _______ like it’s going to come any second. Yeah? In the next scene, it’s the same scenario but you’re getting a little __________ and you all ___ _____. In the last scene, imagine a _____ or __________ has just happened. This is when __________ starts to go haywire. He’s been ____________ throughout the day, ____ on, called a _______, and now he completely loses it. Got it?”

Gene set down his fork, his appetite diminished. Why was Athena so seduced by tragedy?

A chair screeched back against the linoleum floor. The elegant hand gripping it belonged to Hiriko, an attractive, widowed woman of undisclosed age. Gene had met her a couple of months back, when they played ND PEDESTRIANS during an alien invasion. She had a habit of bringing an enormous paperback to set, opening it up, then ignoring it for the rest of the shoot, and she kept a flask in her purse from which she stole small, satisfied sips.

“Do you know who’s playing the lead?” she asked him, twinkling.

Gene could never tell if she was flirting. He wasn’t even sure if he wanted her to flirt. He had not dated anyone in a very long time.

“That young man everyone’s talking about, ______________.”

He was said to be the next (the first?) great Asian American actor of their time, the one who’d raise them from obscurity into, well, something beyond obscurity. His résumé ran the gamut from superhero action flicks to romantic comedies, and now he was, unsurprisingly, segueing into dramas. And his daughter had nabbed him in her film’s lead role. His daughter—the words leaned forward on the edge of his tongue. He yanked them back.

“He’s dating what’s-her-name, the actress who played the last Wonder Woman,” Hiriko added.

Gene’s mind sketched a rough impression of her: blond, full-figured, legs up to here. “Isn’t that something.”

The three chewed in silence. No one said aloud the obvious thought hanging over the table, That would have never happened in my day!, because it would have conceded the world was zipping in a different direction while they felt affixed to the same spot.

The man at wardrobe took one look at Gene and asked if he’d brought a change of clothes. The question was an insult; his clothes were brand-name, from TJ Maxx. Gene did nearly all his shopping at TJ Maxx, a comfortingly neutral store.

He shook his head no without bothering to trot out an excuse, then couldn’t help but cut his eyes at Napoleon and his fake Louis Vuitton luggage. Napoleon pulled out five full sets of options as wardrobe fawned over him.

Inside a portable dressing room that refused to zip up all the way, Gene struggled to tug off his pants without knocking over the flimsy nylon contraption. He cursed himself for ignoring the wardrobe notes from last night. “No bright whites, no brand names, think grimy, interesting patterns acceptable, nothing that causes strobing, though!” Surely that warranted a subtraction of points.

At hair and makeup, his hair was combed through and spritzed. Makeup devoted more time to covering him in soot-colored powder.

“You have great eyebrows,” the makeup artist complimented him. She kissed her brush into a cake of gray and gently stabbed his forehead.

Gene twisted up to look at her. She had purple hair, a flower tattoo trailing across her neck. “Thank you,” he said tremulously. He wished he knew her name.

She looked a little put off by his sincerity. “Sure thing.”

Add three points to the day. He had great eyebrows.

She stepped away to let him review her work in the mirror: He looked poor. Poor and old.

When the availability request had popped up on his phone, it had said only “BYSTANDER for UNNAMED PROJECT.” His eyes had snagged on the text. Something about it crackled, its very nondescriptness setting it apart from other requests.

He had almost turned it down, had almost given up hope he’d ever land on one of his daughter’s sets, but then he remembered she was scheduled to be in New York. He’d read about it on a fan-run social-media account: “Athena Wu rumored to start production on her second feature in Manhattan next month.”

He’d last seen her at the Atlantic City bus terminal, seven years ago. Their goodbye had been benign, even pleasant. When she handed him the envelope of cash, she hadn’t cut any of her usual backhanded or reproachful remarks. And when they parted, she’d even gripped his arm and said, “Good luck.” Good luck, in any language, spoke of well wishes, didn’t it?

Not until weeks, then months, later—time marked by deafening silence to his calls, texts and emails—did he obsessively rewind and freeze-frame the moment. Trying hopelessly to pinpoint when in the course of an hour their relationship had soured and spoiled. When they stopped for Subway sandwiches? Waiting in line for tickets? But that was absurd. He wasn’t so naive as to believe the first thread had unraveled at the Atlantic City bus terminal. No, Athena must have decided sometime before (when?) to “estrange” herself from him. What a funny word, estrange! Gene thought it sounded unnecessarily fancy, almost French, since it called to mind escargots. But sitting smack in the middle of the word was strange, and yes, strange was the word for a part of yourself going off into the world, scaling magnificent heights, while the other part remained a distant spectator. If Gene had to describe the sensation, he’d say it was like catching a glimpse of your elbow on someone else’s arm and wondering, Now how did you end up there?

The PA charged with wrangling them like blind children was Beckett. He wore the standard PA uniform: sneakers, jeans, hoodie, and a holster slung around his hips where a walkie talkie took the place of a gun.

Gene felt paternal toward the PAs, who were invariably in their 20s and considered sleep a fun activity they’d try someday. When an unusually thoughtful PA asked, “Need anything? Everything okay? Let me know if you want water,” Gene had to stop himself from asking, “Do you need anything? Is everything okay with you? Let me know if you want water.”

Beckett, unlucky fellow, was not a PA with a natural loudspeaker built into his lungs. Gene caught the beginning half of his sentence as he crossed the room, his voicing cracking in the middle: “If you have not had your picture taken—”

“What?” Hiriko called. “What was that?”

The question went unanswered and they were transferred into the care of another overworked PA.

Tian formed the start of a line, looking serenely unbothered. Of all the people Gene had ever met on set, Tian had been doing background the longest. He never scrolled through his phone between takes or tried to negotiate sitting down in a scene. He’d never dream of sneaking off to holding, pretending he hadn’t heard his number called. In other words, he was the consummate extra.

The PA asked for their numbers.

“Two,” Tian chimed in his clear voice. Of course he was No. 2 on the call sheet.

Hiriko turned to Napoleon. “How are auditions?”

Unlike her and Gene, Napoleon was an acteur, meaning he had an agent who occasionally secured him auditions in demoralizing rooms not unlike holding.

“I just did one for a commercial,” he said, loud enough for others to hear. “A national one.” Gene and Hiriko exchanged Aren’t we special? glances. “For gastritis, which, sure, isn’t what I planned on for my acting debut, but I wouldn’t have to work for a year: $50,000 on average is what I’m hearing. And don’t forget the residuals.”

If Napoleon lucked out, he’d be guaranteed a lifelong job. Then again, he’d be forever known as the face of gastritis. Which put him out of the running for arthritis guy, ulcers guy, etc.

They shuffled back to their table.

“I hope you get it, Napoleon, I really do.” Gene mostly meant it. He pulled out the bag of peanuts, scrutinized it. Did he deserve a reward?

“You’re just—what—one voucher away from joining SAG?” Napoleon asked, though he’d asked Gene this question before.

Another point docked. “Mm-hmm.”

Hiriko’s eyeglasses slipped down her nose as she leaned forward. “You have to learn a special skill. Sign language. Playing dead. Tap dancing. You know, I once danced with Sessue Hayakawa.” She winked at Gene as he struggled to recalculate her age based on this new bit of information. He wasn’t imagining it—she was flirting. She opened her paperback and scanned Gene’s midsection. “Or just invest in an NYPD costume. You have the build.” Maybe not.

“You know what you got to do?” Napoleon teased. “Insert yourself.”

A few legendary extras had snatched up speaking roles by shouting a line so good, so flawless, they’d rendered themselves indispensable. Infamous among extra lore was the Being John Malkovich scene when a guy whips a beer can at John and hollers, “Think fast!”

Hiriko pursed her lips. “What do you mean?”

Gene recounted the anecdote, pleased as anything, as if it belonged to him and only him.

“Oh, that? That’s been debunked.” Hiriko sipped gaily from her flask. “You didn’t know?”

Gene sighed with inordinate disappointment. Now why did she have to tell him that? He preferred the false version, the better version.

By noon, Beckett’s voice had been reduced to a rasp. “Everyone, Nos. 1 to 75, follow me. We are going to set now. Leave your stuff here. No one will steal your umbrella, I promise. Yes, go to the bathroom now. Bring your IDs to get propped. I said, ‘BRING YOUR IDs.’”

Beckett led them through a tunnel of hallways leading into a massive warehouse. Rows of horizontal lights spanned the length of the walls, tricking the eye into the collective fiction that broad daylight filled the warehouse. Extraordinary, the amount of muscle and sweat poured into movie magic, Gene thought. And he did think it was extraordinary, to the point where he’d look around set and grow a little misty-eyed. I’m a part of movie magic, he’d reflect, and if I so much as step in the wrong direction, I can break the spell.

They passed by a construction area—sawing, hammering, sanding—before entering a replica of a New York City subway station. The uncanniness was surreal: Everything, down to the grimy tiles and dripping metal beams and balled-up, wet trash, had been cloned to perfection.

The set was frantic with people wrangling their respective gear: cameras, lighting, sound, hair and makeup, the person who stuck neon tape on the ground (how was he named in the credits? Gene had always wondered). He spotted Jack yapping into his headset, a different PA reprimanding Beckett, Napoleon hitting on a guy half his age, and then, and then—he saw her.

She was staring at a screen, seated in a raised folding chair. Her hair was short now, chin-length, not long as she’d always worn it. She looked tired. She looked awfully young compared with everyone around her. She was dressed like a PA. Did she need water? He could have cried.

“You.” Beckett snapped his fingers. “Here.”

He pointed to a spot a few yards away from Athena. Her outline flitted in the corner of Gene’s eye.

Napoleon nudged him. “What are you doing?”

Gene realized everyone was grudgingly lying down. “Which scene is this?”

“How the hell would I know? They never tell us shit.”

“If wardrobe says I ruined this coat, it’s not my problem,” Hiriko murmured. She took off her glasses, then looked at Gene for approval. He offered up a noncommittal noise.

As soon as Athena was preoccupied, Gene carefully lowered himself down; he couldn’t bear for her to catch him panting and fumbling, the spitting image of the old man he must have occupied in her imagination. He stared up at the enormous ceiling. The floor beneath him was cold.

The stand-in for the principal actor was shuttled off as Jack’s voice descended from above. “Okay, so this is before __________ has entered the station. Think of it as the ____ before the _______. Right now we want to create a _________ mood. Got it?” He was met with blank faces. “Lie still, but move around. Scratch something, cough—no, mime coughing—just don’t look dead. Okay?” Jack clapped his hands together.

Gene struggled to make sense of the film. Was it abstract? Athena’s first film had been abstract (an excess of neon signs at night; decadent food left uneaten on tables; opaque conversations) but at the same time the very opposite of abstract, given that 10 minutes of it were devoted to the gang rape of a girl. A girl who looked not unlike his daughter. Gene’s instinct was to flee the theater mid-film, and he might have if his body hadn’t congealed into a useless block of flesh. Afterward, he used the lobby’s free Wi-Fi to scrape the internet for information on how he was supposed to feel. However illogical, he couldn’t help but suspect Athena left signs for him in her art. If she’d baked a message into this first film, what on earth was it?

In an interview, when asked about the film’s explicit violence, Athena had answered, “I had to show the truth. This happened. We can’t look away from it,” referencing a 1985 news story out of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Gene understood this; he did. At least on an intellectual level. But who was it for? Who wanted to watch it? He certainly didn’t want to see five white men gang-rape a girl who looked not unlike his daughter. He could’ve lived his whole life without seeing it. Happily. But maybe he was a philistine. He favored comedies. Animated movies. Black-and-white classics. He was a sucker for unambiguous endings.

In the lobby, he’d put away his phone with an uneasy heart. Whenever he watched interviews of his daughter, she came across as angry. Angry and self-righteous. The combination made him profoundly sad. Wasn’t she tired? He wanted to tell her to take a break. To allow herself carefree stupidity, the birthright of anyone her age. But his daughter was on a crusade (against what?). She was terrifying. She’d always terrified him.

“Napoleon?” Gene whispered.

“Yeah?”

Napoleon’s head was positioned just above his. Tiger Balm wafted from his forehead; the man was morphing into an apothecary. “I ever tell you I have a daughter?”

“QUIET ON SET.”

The urge to toss it all out the window seized Gene. To throw a beer can and yell, “Think fast!” Gene licked his chapped lips. “She’s the director.”

Napoleon twisted around in disbelief as someone barked, “Stay in your first positions.”

“No kidding?” He fished for the miniature headshots he kept in his wallet. “Hey, introduce me.”

Gene swatted his hand away. “She doesn’t know I’m here.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Gene?” Napoleon demanded, abruptly a full Staten Islander, a fact he suppressed until he couldn’t.

“HOLD THE TALK. LAST LOOKS.”

Napoleon brushed his hair back and sucked in his cheeks.

“Pictures up … Rolling … Background … Action!”

Everyone shushed.

Action! was the sacred word that recontextualized the set into a nearly religious space. Every second carried weight and they all bore it, each and every one of them, for a common purpose, and surely such collective devotion gestured at a kind of religion, didn’t it?

Gene noticed only then that the principal actor had materialized. Gene startled a little in recognition—so Hiriko had been right.

The principal actor fell to the ground, moaning and writhing, before crawling over the extras. His foot nearly grazed Gene’s chin. After a while, his wails echoed through the set. In Gene’s opinion, he was overdoing it, his drama sliding toward melodrama.

“Cut!” Athena’s voice. Gene’s heart did a jumping jack.

“RESETTING.”

For the next two hours, while the camera was moved into every conceivable position, Gene remained suspended in a state of anxiety so intense it bordered on elation. When Jack called, “Checking the gate!” his posture caved with relief.

Beckett allowed the extras to stop by the crafty truck before heading back to holding. Gene stretched and dawdled, loitering until the others had filed off set. He felt oddly light and heavy at once. He steadied himself and walked toward Athena, the calm center in a cluster of moving bodies, her headphones hanging off one ear, still staring intently at a screen monitor.

Gene kept his eyes down as he passed, but at the last minute he looked up and what do you know, she was looking right at him.

“Dad?” she said, not unkindly, not even so much in surprise.

“Athena!”

She continued to stare at him. Then she got up and hissed, “Follow me.”

From the back, she looked very thin—malnourished, practically. Her walk still listed toward the left, a flaw inherited from her mother. She led him behind the set, lights blaring synthetic daylight above them, over electrical cords and past carts stacked with bottled water, through a set of double doors into the parking lot. Outside, it was drizzling.

Gene’s hands trembled; he was on the verge of splitting apart from happiness. He’d planned out this moment hundreds of times. The apologies. The forgiveness. The reunification, like two weary countries after a civil war.

“You’re sick,” she said.

“I’ve missed you.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m acting,” he smiled.

She smiled back like she wanted to run him over with a car. “I could have you arrested.”

“No, you can’t,” he said lightly, and even she looked struck by this truth.

“Please leave.”

“You look great, Athena.”

“You have no right—”

“I have every right.” His voice had lost its friendly edge.

At this, Athena laughed unconvincingly. The skin around her eyes had already started to sag. She’s only 27, he thought.

“I have no obligation to you,” she said.

“I disagree.”

“Your opinion doesn’t matter here.”

“‘Opinion?’” he repeated skeptically. “Who’s talking about opinions? You’re my daughter—”

“Stop.”

The hardness etched into the word was so startling, he took a step backwards.

“I will not engage with you on your terms. You will not cross the boundaries I’ve put up to safeguard my well-being.” She had switched to the clipped, even register of a therapist.

If she would at least scream, if she would at least cry! Anything would have been preferable to this phony wall of talk therapy. And yet he sensed the wall she’d patched together was fragile, the thinnest of paper holding back a flood. If he just pressed a little further—

“I’ll leave you alone if you give me a legitimate reason why,” Gene countered. He was convinced he’d engineered an indisputable workaround, because the contrary, leaving her alone for good, was unbearable. Instead, he stood dumbstruck as Athena fired terms at him like emotional abuse and parental neglect. As proof, she brought up the money, though she’d assured him in Atlantic City that she wanted to—what was it?—put him on the road to recovery. She told him she’d been going to Al-Anon for two years after realizing none of it was her fault.

Gene frowned. Al-Anon?

She’d always blamed herself, did he know that? As a child, she had to do everything, she had to track his purchases, his whereabouts, cover up his blunders for the sake of her mother, throw out the empty bottles, open the windows in the morning to air out the stink. Keeping their family from collapsing in on itself had fallen to her, but if she so much as asked for a packed lunch, she feared she was acting selfishly. She existed on perpetual tiptoe, afraid the slightest misstep would set him off, unable to go to bed for hours because she was waiting, she was always waiting. And yet at school, she had to pretend she had normal kid problems, make up excuses for why she fell asleep during class or why Gene had missed another parent-teacher conference. Thanks to Al-Anon, she had finally started to heal.

Heal. The word alone was a condemnation. A younger version of himself might have shouted or slammed an object against a table to tug the narrative back toward reason. But this version of himself—tired, lonely, and tired of feeling lonely—could only grab a handful of empty words. “I see.”

He couldn’t even bring himself to say sorry. He loathed himself for it. But apologizing would admit to her version of the truth.

When Gene didn’t say more, Athena blinked in surprise. “Well—yes. And I need you to respect that.” She turned and walked toward the doors.

Gene called out, “I wanted to say I’m happy for you.” The trembling in happy sickened him. He’d tried so hard to sound cheerful.

Athena slowed her steps without stopping. He started subtracting points, then lost count.

A year before they parted at the Atlantic City bus terminal, she’d been the same at her mother’s funeral. Withholding. Cold. Distant. Gene knew parents could be withholding, cold, distant. He didn’t know children could be too.

Athena made all the funeral arrangements, and for that, Gene was grateful. Well, more accurately, he felt blips of gratitude, bright buoys in the sea waving to him from afar through a haze of near-constant inebriation. From the hospital to the church, he was awash, afloat on a mixture he’d concocted of suanmeitang and whiskey, while Athena rushed around making calls, answering the door, heating up leftovers. He was inconsolable. He would have liked to drown. He couldn’t think of Bi-Ling’s wasted body sans thinking with morbid jealousy of the pain-free place she now inhabited. The few times clarity visited before a numbing headache took their place, he’d wonder, Why aren’t you inconsolable? My busy daughter. My oh-so-efficient daughter. Why have you left me flailing alone in this watery grief?

“Hi, yes, one black coffee, cheese crackers, a Rice Krispie treat, and … Sorry, what do you have back there?” He sensed the line behind him twitching with impatience. “And a granola bar. Wait, never mind—a fruit cup,” he said sagely. He hated fruit cups. The points demanded a punishment. Or a reward. He no longer knew.

Gene had conceived of the good-day-bad-day-bagel system after attending his first, and only, AA meeting. First and only because he just couldn’t look himself squarely in the eye in the light of day. If he looked at a problem aslant, it didn’t fully exist and therefore it couldn’t fully dominate his reality. Cowardly, he knew. But in his own way, he had managed. Hadn’t he?

“So you don’t want the other stuff?” The cook’s face didn’t sugarcoat his exasperation.

“No, I do,” he sighed.

Arms full, coffee sloshing onto his borrowed shoes, Gene walked back to holding and sat down. Athena’s words nagged at him. “‘Impact over intent.’ What does that mean, anyway?”

Napoleon shrugged as Hiriko turned thoughtful, flipping the pages of her book without glancing at them. “Do you have an example?” she asked.

“That’s what I’m saying—it doesn’t have any meaning. You can’t disagree with it. Like an ace card.” Gene stared suspiciously at his empty fruit cup—when had he eaten it?

“Are you okay, buddy?” Napoleon asked with unusual sympathy. As if Gene were unwell. Or worse, senile. “Did you … talk to her?”

Before Gene could answer, Beckett called them back to set. As they filed down the hallway, Hiriko held out her flask. Just by its heft in his palm, Gene knew it was half full—funny how an old instinct kicked right back in as if it had never left. He hesitated for a second, then cleared it in a single gulp. He had pinned Hiriko for a sherry drinker, but it was straight gin.

She raised an eyebrow. “One of those days?”

What Gene could not abide was being smudged away. That’s how Athena looked at him—like a smudge on the plain of her pristine life. A relic of her pre-famous past she’d never have to set eyes on again simply because she could choose not to, so low was he beneath her line of sight.

Unbelievable that she’d denied the fact of their biological relationship. Of course, she’d packaged it in different terms: chosen family and personal autonomy. Nonsense was what it was.

But Athena had always rewritten reality to match her preferences. Though her mother had died from a sickness hoarded in her genes—the Huntington’s so engulfing, it swallowed her personality—Athena claimed the disease had been triggered by Gene. The last night they spent at the hospital, she launched accusation after accusation at him: that Bi-Ling had abandoned her family and friends in Taiwan to move 8,000 miles for him based on promises he never intended to keep. That she’d lived a miserable and isolated life in this foreign country. That Gene, as self-centered and responsible as a teenager, couldn’t see it.

After Atlantic City, Gene had decided to start fresh, to become someone … fresher. He was a good man. Not a perfect man, no. He’d had a temper when he was younger, he could admit to that. And the drinking hadn’t helped (harder to admit). But he found it laughable that some people believed an instance of human error could negate, could indeed cancel out, love. His own father used to beat him, even when Gene was old enough to fight him off. And yet he’d forgiven him, in the sense that he had not known his father’s fist needed forgiving.

He’d been five years sober—until now, anyway. He’d forgotten to tell Athena in the parking lot. He’d wanted so badly to pocket her pride in him, to be able to gaze upon it anytime he wanted. He waited for something akin to momentous sorrow to wash over him, his hard-won sobriety erased in a blink, and yet the reality of what that sip portended seemed very far away.

Points lost, points gained.

He decided he would not think about it anymore and that was that; Gene had always been good at compartmentalizing. He studied his aching legs instead. He should have worn his compression socks. Or maybe the feeling was heartburn. Where was Napoleon with his Po Chai pills when you needed him?

They were shooting the last scene of the day. Two hours ago, they’d wrapped the third (or was it the first?) scene and passed into overtime, which meant a tidy $24.75 per hour, but what would Gene have given to just go home already. It was a mistake to have come. A mistake to assume knowing could ever substitute the softness, the loveliness, of not knowing.

Jack was bouncing up and down, somehow even more energetic than at the start of the day. Gene would bet money he’d been subsisting on a steady dose of Adderall.

“So in this scene, you’re all exhausted, okay?”

Napoleon snorted.

“But this is the big moment we’ve been building up to, when __________ is finally going to ________. Remember he’s been _____ on, _________, ______ around, and he’s had it up to here. It’s an emotional scene, a highly charged scene, and I want you all to feel it.”

The extras were to stumble haphazardly around the subway station—easy when everyone was floating in a fugue state at this 12th hour.

Jack moved them into their first positions. “Don’t be afraid to run into each other—I mean, don’t hurt yourself,” he quickly amended, no doubt thinking of lawsuits, “but act like you can’t see where you’re going. Okay?”

“If I ruin this coat, it won’t be my fault,” Hiriko murmured again. She looked at Gene for affirmation. He was in no mood to give it this time.

Commotion was developing farther up along the set, where the stand-ins and stunt coordinator were situated, but came to a pause when the principal actor emerged. His hair and makeup team trailed behind him, spraying and smoothing and powdering, as he carefully avoided eye contact with the background actors, then checked his phone before sliding it into his pocket.

Unbelievable, Gene scoffed.

Athena conferred with the principal actor and the stunt coordinator, the three of them speaking in agitated tones. Then the stunt coordinator called “No. 2,” and Tian walked over to join them. Gene kept his eyes on Athena, willing her to look his way. She refused. After a few minutes, Tian returned to his first position.

“Pictures up … Rolling … Background … Action!”

Gene zigzagged across the set, half blind without needing to act. The gin coursed agreeably through him. He slammed his shoulder into several people, Napoleon included, who dolled out a sorrowful look in his direction. He walked at a faster pace, everyone’s faces smearing together, then slowed his steps when he heard the principal actor’s voice. He zigzagged toward it.

The principal actor gripped Tian by the collar, then sneered a slur in his face and pushed him. He mimed kicking Tian for an excruciatingly long time. Gene looked at Hiriko—she had broken protocol and closed her eyes. The sudden violence in the scene, in the warehouse, came as a terrible intrusion. Nothing, not even Jack’s frenetic explanations, could have prepared them for it.

“Still rolling!” the second AD called. A PA rushed up to the principal actor with an unlabeled bottle and squirted milky liquid into his mouth. He leaned back, about to spit in Tian’s face. Gene’s stomach clutched.

“Stop,” Tian said flatly. “I can’t.”

A few extras stalled in their movements, unsure if this was his line, if he’d been anointed out of the background masses at long last to a speaking role.

“Cut!” Athena called. She got down from her chair and walked over. “What do you mean you can’t?” she said with a hint of annoyance. “You just agreed to a second ago.” Her hands flowered open and closed, open and closed—a nervous habit.

“I don’t understand why we’re hurting each other,” Tian frowned. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Behind Gene, two PAs were whispering.

“—thought a _____ actor was too ‘controversial’ and a _____ actor was too ‘predictable.’” The other PA whistled under his breath. “Apparently, she said the ‘safest choice’ was an all _____ cast.”

Gene couldn’t help but grimace—his daughter’s vision of society was awfully reductive. But for whatever reason, she must have derived comfort from reducing it down to manageable parts. Was it so different from his good-day-bad-day-bagel system?

“I want to call my SAG rep,” Tian continued. Not the consummate extra, after all.

The principal actor vainly suppressed an eye roll.

Another extra addressed Athena. “What exactly are you trying to accomplish here?”

“Abuse against _____ is on the rise and—”

“And your solution is more abuse?”

“But it’s not real,” Athena said softly, as though to herself.

Tian laughed. “Am I not real?”

The question ricocheted through the crowd of extras.

For a shameful, fleeting moment, Gene thought of calling out, “Impact over intention, Athena! Isn’t that what you said?”

She was no doubt wearing the same contemptuous mask she’d worn in the parking lot, but when he looked in her direction, her expression spelled horror. Authority leaked out of her by the second. She looked so small. She looked so young.

In elementary school, Athena used to film him and Bi-Ling with a cardboard camera constructed from toilet-paper rolls. He’d crushed it in his hands one night, hostile and drunk and then hostile because he was drunk, but the next day, he’d bought her a used Sony camcorder with that week’s paycheck, which meant he’d have to skip meals twice a day, but she’d thrown her arms around his waist and it had been worth every spasm of hunger.

When she’d asked him in her little-adult voice (terrifying, she’d been, even then) if they had enough money to afford the camera, he’d lied. “Whatever you want, I’ll get it for you” was his favorite refrain, even when Bi-Ling scolded him for turning her into a bottomless person, someone whose desires have no end.

He never told Athena about the illegal gambling that had paid off her mother’s hospital bills. About the months he spent processing fake IDs in Jackson Heights as a second source of income. About how, during her freshman year of college, after his bike was stolen and he lost his job as a deliveryman, he’d spent six dehumanizing weeks homeless. She believed what she wanted to believe. No, she believed what he’d let her believe. Maybe both were true.

He realized with sudden, achingly sweet clarity what Athena had meant in her interview. Directing brought her control over her environment because it offset the chaos he brought to it. When she zoomed in and out on her camera, perhaps she left their apartment in Astoria. Perhaps she traveled somewhere else entirely—to a safer, better place.

“I’ll do it.”

Gene walked into the heart of the commotion.

“What are you doing, buddy?” Napoleon asked, resting a hand on his sleeve. He shrugged him off.

Tian looked at Gene, shook his head slightly, then walked off set. Gene half-expected people to clap. No one did.

Gene stepped in front of the principal actor. Up close, his handsomeness seemed unearned.

“You don’t have to, Dad.” Athena spoke quietly. Everyone stared at her.

The attempt to stop him only emboldened Gene. He sat down on the ground. Strangely, it wasn’t as cold as before. “Kick me,” he said to the principal actor. “Go ahead, spit on me.”

He had done the math. This is what the points commanded.

The crew looked around at one another. After a moment, the sound guy re-hoisted the boom. The lighting team repositioned themselves. Athena walked back to her director’s chair.

Gene lay prostrate before his part-time friends, the other extras, the crew, and, though he could not see her, his daughter, who watched him from behind the camera’s unblinking eye.

Gene qualified to join SAG that day. On IMDb, he is credited as ELDERLY ASIAN MAN. A gift from his daughter; according to union laws, his silent role did not require screen credit.

After the film’s release, he read review after review, hoping to reach a verdict on his daughter’s work without experiencing it, but the reviews were as mixed as he felt. When he finally purchased a ticket at his local theater early one morning, he was one of three in the audience. He thought he’d feel detached, looking at himself pretending to be someone else, knowing exactly what tricks had been turned to tamper with the fake until it could pass as real.

But as Gene watched himself gasping and convulsing on the subway platform—his arms tucked helplessly around his stomach, his mouth limp with resignation—he felt knocked over by such exquisite grief and, to his surprise, discovered his cheeks were wet.

John Egan's stoppage time goal rescues Sheffield United against non-league Wrexham in a frenetic FA Cup fourth-round tie.

Local residents are asked to keep their windows and doors closed as fire crews try to contain the blaze.

John Mayer has announced a first-ever solo acoustic tour.

John Legend shared his first photo with newborn daughter, Esti, on social media.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week I asked, “What do you think of the diversity-training and DEI industries?” Dozens of readers shared their personal experiences, good and bad––so many, in fact, that I’m going to run some additional responses on Wednesday (if you haven’t yet signed up for the newsletter, do so here).

Today, we’ll start with four people who’ve led diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in some capacity, and then we’ll hear from people who’ve been on the receiving end of diversity training at work. E. is a cynic about the aims of diversity work in corporate America:

I have worked in HR for Fortune 500 companies for 25 years in diversity, diversity and inclusion, and as an Equal Employment Opportunity officer. The intent of DEI training is for executives to think they are improving the organization for “minorities,” LGBTQ people, women, people with disabilities, etc. Spend a little money without any accountability or significant change. DEI training is to check a box. It is not meant to improve anything, and it doesn’t. Some trainings––the Intercultural Development Inventory, unconscious bias––make things worse. In general, DEI training exists to make executive teams and boards feel good.

M.V. is “enthusiastic about DEI work” and believes the grassroots group he leads at his workplace conducts it better than most outside consultants:

Far too often we trust external experts to bring solutions, which can neglect the critical value of truly centering employees and building culture from the bottom up. I’ve sat in corporate training sessions in which well-intended academics identify behaviors like “avoiding eye contact” as racial microaggressions. These generalities can do more harm than good; what if the person who can’t keep eye contact has social anxiety? Have we propagated that anxiety by encouraging the recipient to assume the worst implication?

The road toward reinforcing separation and the road toward building connection are, in fact, two different roads with different approaches. So how does our group approach DEI?

First, we value personal storytelling, which has been championed by the Moral Courage College founder Irshad Manji. There is a difference between hearing, say, about the importance of pronoun use from a nonbinary employee as compared to a training module. A discussion about labels with a diverse set of employees drives home the message that the “correct” term for a person can’t just be looked up but can only be gleaned through personal connection and the grace that comes with knowing the limitations of words.

Second, we adopt the teachings of Loretta Ross and Loan Tran on “calling in the calling-out culture,” which they offer in a superb online course. Though call-outs have their place, building trust and fostering mutual vulnerability are superior for having challenging conversations.

Third, we promote genuine curiosity and asking questions. The work by Mónica Guzmán of Braver Angels—including her book, I Never Thought of It That Way—teaches us to strive to understand the people we read and hear about but never meet. As she states, “Whoever is underrepresented in your life will be overrepresented in your imagination.”

Personal storytelling, calling people in, and getting genuinely curious: These three sets of tools can transform a culture and really help people be seen for who they actually are, not just the phantoms that fill the gaps in our heads, which are the root of much bias. These approaches that challenge the usual corporate DEI programming are largely championed by women of color (Manji, Ross, Guzmán, Chloé Valdary). For skeptics of DEI alternatives who also believe in centering the thinking of women of color during these times, I can suggest no stronger slate of philosophies to challenge their thinking.

Taisha has worked in the diversity industry for 15 years and believes a shift in its approach is needed: In a crisis-prone world, she writes, we need to organize people around shared goals, not shared identities. If a diverse group focuses on a goal (such as higher wages) that would benefit everyone working toward its, or a goal (such as reducing carbon emissions) that would benefit society in general, diversity goals will be achieved as a by-product of everyone cooperating.

She writes:

A common goal motivates people to handle themselves, so their personalities become less of a hindrance to the group’s purpose; to identify and develop their unique assets to benefit the group; and to recognize and mobilize their peers to do the same for the group’s good. Humans are inherently selfish and self-centered. But when we find something to believe in, we are more willing to set aside our personal likes and dislikes to work alongside others who share our goals. Then we think less of our identity differences. This sameness of purpose achieves inclusion without sacrificing differences.

The success of current unionizing efforts illustrate this new approach to DEI that I call  “Purpose not Personalities.” Unions organize a diverse group of people around a centrally compelling purpose (better treatment, higher wages, etc.) that motivates them to set aside whatever issues they might have with one another and dedicate the best of themselves, including their unique perspectives and skills, to help the group achieve success. To solve the many crises facing us, organizations can and should shift their DEI efforts to encourage less focus on personality or identity differences and more on group GOOD, trusting people to work out their differences as they lose sight of themselves.

Now on to the great majority of correspondents who have experienced DEI training sessions as participants. John agrees with the notion that an emphasis on shared goals tends to yield success:

I spent 24 years in the organization that, in my opinion, has done the best job with diversity and inclusion: the U.S. military. The real success happened at a cultural level: We all had a unifying mission. Anyone not in the military was the other, for the kinds of people that need an “other.”  And if someone did bring their prejudices and racism to work in the military, they were dealt with quite harshly. In this example, we should see a way forward. It is a shared mission and shared purpose that brings all people together. Anytime you substitute some other word for human, dehumanizing behavior occurs.

Our leaders, DEI educators, and media should all stress our shared culture and humanity. Instead, our leaders and DEI educators emphasize and exacerbate differences. We are doing the opposite of the right thing to bring about less racism and prejudice.

It’s noteworthy, I think, that the military took this approach with race far earlier than with sexual orientation, with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell formally in place until 2011, when the unifying mission (and the justness of equality under the law) was treated as mattering more than the difference in identity.

J., a high-school teacher in Canada, writes:

Diversity training is not about diversity. Diversity training is about providing excuses to institutions that don’t want to tackle poverty and the fundamental inequality of our capitalist system. Instead, they blame “institutional”' racism, an intentionally obscure term. What does it look like? How does one measure it? Who is implicated?

The conceit of these sessions during my 20 years as a teacher: You frontline workers, YOU are the reason these students fail. In my context—high schools—the only “proof” required for this conceit is the fact that some demographic groups do worse than others. We know that outcomes tell an incomplete story when variables like income, family, mental health, etc. are ignored. Diversity training is privileged people (professionals, administrators, politicians, professors, academics, many of whom make a good living as “experts” in this field) advancing a story, a theory. Yet, the literature demonstrates no meaningful successes to this decades-long progressive experiment.

We need viewpoint diversity in our institutions. Our fixation as progressives on dogma, and a narrow, Orwellian definition of what counts as diversity, is as much fuel for the culture wars as the excesses of the right. It’s just that we lefties are, ironically, too blind to our own privilege—educational privilege, class privilege, trauma privilege, etc.—to see it.

S. used to love being a professor:

I am a Bernie Sanders voter. I have spent 25 years working toward countering racism. I have lost friends and family, as I was “too woke.” I had my dream job, teaching mostly underprivileged students. I now almost loathe my job.

Faculty have been subjected to an authoritarian agenda of DEI/social justice since George Floyd was killed. His death had nothing to do with our campus or state, but it’s as if nothing matters anymore but racism, DEI, and payback for his situation. We are constantly peppered with meaningless utopian aspirations toward “equality of outcomes,” which is patently absurd, even within a family, let alone a state, school, nation, or planet. We are forced to listen to meaningless equity language and endure tortuous training and workshops, often required. They are usually run by unimpressive people whose qualifications seem dubious, usually taking the chance to scold the white faculty who have earned master’s and Ph.D.s and are established and renowned teachers who committed their lives to average-to-low pay for the sake of equity and justice.

Nobody dares offer any dissent. I have spoken to high-level administrators, people white and nonwhite, and they will not say anything. Nobody dares counter the social-justice/equity people. All are fearful of cancellation or firing. All have families and bills to pay and err on the side of lethargic caution. Everybody knows none of this is helping students.

I will never vote conservative on any policy, for what it’s worth. I will, however, wonder if I am in the most Orwellian career imaginable. My irritation is endless and my despondency palpable. My friends are tired of hearing about it. I’m a tenured, published, respected professor in California. on the verge of depression for the first time in my life.

Sherri, a gay woman who worked from 1988 to 2017, shared her thoughts on diversity training:

I’m a Ph.D. chemist, meaning I spent my career in a very male-dominated industry at a time when senior-level women were very rare, much less senior-level out LGBTQ people. I was closeted for the first 10 years of my career and then very out. In the ’90s, while I was still fairly junior and still closeted, my company, like many in the chemicals industry, started a Leadership Training protocol that in part focused on diversity awareness. I am convinced it is one of the worst things the company could have done.

They took a gaggle of senior managers off-site, away from day-to-day work pressures for a week; raised their awareness ofn “diversity”––which really just focused on representation––then sent them back with no skills for truly creating change. They all then felt that they “got it” and weren’t the problem. But day to day, they went back to their ingrained behaviors. Only now they felt enlightened and didn’t even try to look in the mirror.

Later, when I was out, I became a popular speaker on the internal circuit of department meetings to discuss what it felt like to be a gay senior woman at the company. I spent a fair amount of time trying to sensitize people to the concept of privilege without calling it that. The analogy I used was a fish versus a scuba diver. Both could survive in the ocean, but the fish did so effortlessly as the environment was built around their needs and capabilities. The scuba diver needed an oxygen tank, wet suit, fins, and had to expend a fair amount of energy to just survive in the ocean, much less thrive. The scuba diver was constantly aware of his difference and how much conscious effort it took to navigate underwater, and it was exhausting. The fish didn’t even know what water was.  

We are all fish in some ways and scuba divers in others. Where you are a fish, remember what it feels like when you are a scuba diver. And reach out to the scuba divers and help them survive.

We are so bent out of shape focusing on what we consider a “defining characteristic” that we miss what is most important: seeing each person as an individual human. We generalize and make assumptions based on gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation, or what have you. Maybe instead we should follow the Ted Lasso model of being “people curious.” Teach people about unintentional bias that all humans carry and use nontraditional examples like assumptions about how someone dresses or the school they went to or their accent. Then focus on the fact that bias in and of itself isn’t bad; it’s what you do with the knowledge that you carry bias. Don’t focus so much on someone’s speech or behavior as much as on what they should learn from it.

We will all make mistakes; we will all offend; in most cases it is not intentional. We all want to be seen as fully human and treated with respect. Can’t we just focus on that?

Richard is an engineer and describes how the DEI initiatives he’s been exposed to have changed:

In 2000, I moved from the U.K. to the U.S.A.

It was a job-related move, within a large company, working with semiconductors for automotive applications. About three years later, I encountered my first corporate DEI initiative. In the simplest terms, the company informed us that hiring practices were changing to increase profit. The training consisted of a few pages of reading, followed by a discussion during my manager’s weekly group meeting.

My boss provided us with a relevant example, and a nod in my direction. “Imagine a car with a subsystem design flaw that’s only exposed when driving on the left-hand side of the road.” He’d made his point: having a diverse team working on a problem would result in a more robust solution.

By 2018, I was working for a different tech company. I was also living in a much redder state, and DEI had become a divisive issue. Arriving extremely late to the game, my employer started rolling out DEI training. The introductory reading material was reluctant to mention the profit motive for maintaining a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workforce. DEI was presented as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end.

Over the course of a year, a new branch appeared on the org chart, a vice president was hired, corporate goals were set, support groups established, and mailing lists created. Personal DEI goals were defined, refined, and aligned with corporate goals. Employee-development task lists were expected to feature several DEI-related objectives. Progress would need to be demonstrated on a quarterly basis. Mostly, my DEI training consisted of online “unconscious bias” courses provided by an external company.

At first, I was enthusiastic. Engineers like knowing how things work, and I thought I might gain some insight into my biases. But I soon realized that instead of gaining an increased level of self-awareness, I was simply learning the names of a long list of biases. Meanwhile, the continuing stream of emails from the DEI branch of the organization prompted me to set up an email filter, and my enthusiasm for the initiative began to wane. I started to feel like my corporate parents were openly expressing a preference for one of my siblings. It turns out you definitely can have too much of a good thing.

During one of my unconscious-bias courses, I learned that groups who’ve enjoyed an unchallenged, privileged position are the same groups most likely to feel threatened by change. What the courses didn’t mention was that any backlash directed at the intended beneficiaries of DEI initiatives would have been misplaced. I certainly felt exasperated with my employer, though.

The company seemed unwilling to explicitly state that certain new employees provided extra, unquantifiable value. And at no point did the company decide that some of that value should be returned to each new hire in the form of a higher salary. In fact, while the DEI initiative was being rolled out, salary ranges were tightened to prevent perceived discrimination. I’ve become less tolerant of heavy-handed corporate initiatives. A corporation should be able to profit by becoming more diverse, equitable, and inclusive while maintaining the morale of existing employees. In my experience, hitting the optimum rate of corporate culture change is difficult.

Greg, 61, says diversity training at the large aerospace company where he works has been addressed more intelligently and effectively than he would have anticipated based on media coverage.

He writes:

The training we had was pretty good, even to a skeptical observer. I remember a compelling discussion by one diversity trainer who said that we most frequently associate diversity considerations with gender and race, but that was in part a historical accident because those groupings were particularly important in the 1960s and 1970s when thinking about diversity as a workplace concept emerged. This trainer used an alternative case of employees in today’s workplace with prominent tattoos, a group that may be viscerally disturbing to older employees based on our conditioning when we were young, but tattoos are essentially irrelevant to workplace performance.

After President Donald Trump was elected, about 2,000 of our senior-level employees were on a quarterly phone call with our CEO. One asked: Given the change in administration, were we going to change our diversity policies? Our CEO replied that we would change nothing, because our policies were not to curry political favor. Our diversity strategy was to out-compete our rival companies, because we would expand our access to talent by addressing issues that have historically undervalued certain groups of people.

K. resents the training she was subjected to while doing civic work:

I have volunteered with the City of Madison (Wisconsin) Clerk’s Office every election since the 1990s and in recent years have worked as a special voting deputy helping with voter registration, taking absentee ballots to nursing homes, and the like. The city clerk’s office motto is “We exist to assist,” and most of us there let that be our guiding light in the service of democracy. Because our city is deeply concerned about equity, “diversity training” has been required for city personnel for the past several years. These sessions seem to be aimed at people who have never considered—much less worked to ameliorate—the problem of inequity and have only served to offend and alienate me.

I am an old progressive whose first professional position was bringing support services to migrant farm workers and their families. As a female raised in the 1960s, I know ALL about discrimination; you don’t need to describe it. The condescension implicit in these “woke” puppies presenting the novel idea that some people start off at a disadvantage to others is offensive.

I love my city, deeply respect its staff, and am still fully committed to equality as a cause, but showing me diversity slide shows has not had what I am pretty certain was the desired effect. And, yeah, it’s not about me, but please. I’ve been trying all my life. All. My. Life. I’ve been trying to make a difference.

Megan believes the DEI programming she has seen in higher education doesn’t address academia’s most pressing problems:

Grad school is a toxic environment: Students on assistantships are paid poverty wages, given health care they can barely afford, are overworked by advisers who perpetuate the bad mentorship practices they experienced, and get degrees in fields flooded with people vying for jobs. This is a bad environment for even a cis white male or female with good mental health … and the focus is increasing departmental diversity and pronoun training.

How is any person supposed to thrive here?

T.M. doesn’t fit neatly into any identity box:

I’ve worked as an adjunct professor for over a decade, mostly at a prestigious northeastern university. I’m also of Assyrian descent, with a heavy mix of old-school New England. I sometimes think the reason I wound up in American studies as a discipline is because in 1991, while I was doing a genealogy project for fifth-grade social studies, the teacher told me I couldn’t be an American. Here I was, 11 years old, the United States had gone to war in Iraq, and I didn’t feel comfortable trying to explain who or what Assyrians are. Iraq didn’t exist in 1906 when my father’s family came to America.

I don’t consider myself white-passing, but it’s been obvious since I was young that my grandfather and great-grandfather were of darker complexion than I am. I’m aware that I’ve been privileged by my white complexion, but I am often met with resistance to my belief that DEI is actually reinforcing the arbitrary cultural signifier of whiteness rather than decreasing it. Today, because I don’t fit neatly into one box, I find that the administrators at the university where I teach lack the same nuance as my fifth-grade social-studies teacher. My questions as to the efficacy of trainings are met with vague, bureaucratic language.

Echoing the language of Martin Luther King Jr., we at the university are told we are now a “beloved community,” but unlike MLK, the DEI initiatives ignore economic equity or inclusion. Diversity, instead, is merely a way to fit people into categorical racial boxes. It’s no wonder some people are resentful of being categorized into something that is so ill-defined.

The academy has failed to generate conversations that truly explore the functions of race and class. It’s off-putting to get boilerplate messaging about racial diversity from people who make six-figure salaries when they are the same people who cut my health care last year. I don’t see the equity or inclusion of that decision, but yet we are now “beloved.”

How can we truly be diverse, equitable, and inclusive when over half the faculty who teach in higher education are treated as disposable? We’re denying the very cracks in our foundation the administrators claim to be fixing. DEI isn’t a solution. It’s a corporate orthodoxy that creates problems. I am distrusting of these initiatives.

Caleb scoffs at “equity” efforts that ignore income:

I was an administrative assistant at a law firm in Maine. Through six hours of mandatory DEI trainings, professional and administrative staff alike were educated on the nuanced definitions of equality and equity, complete with visual aids of children standing on different sizes of wooden boxes. Meanwhile, there was an elephant in the room that was never acknowledged: the attorneys sitting in on these Zoom trainings with us were, and are still, paid in the range of five to 20 times what the administrative staff make.

During the pandemic, while we were expected to consume gas and time commuting to the office, masked up and at risk of infection, to sort and scan mail, print checks, etc., the professional staff could work from home, expense meals, and receive compensation for work-related travel. When I asked if I could receive compensation for my 90-minute commute, I was laughed out of the office. The consensus of the administrative staff after our mandatory six hours of preachy DEI trainings: They are a cruel joke so long as they ignore financial inequality. Of course, they could hardly be so popular in the business world if they highlighted the outrageous economic inequality it fosters.

Jaleelah, a student, describes how diversity programs feature in the world of competitive debate in Canada:

Virtually all debate teams and competitions have “equity officers” (a name that would give Ron DeSantis an aneurysm) who are responsible for “making sure participants are comfortable.” In practice, this means that barely trained university students are tasked with a wide range of responsibilities. Here is a list of equity functions I support:

Arranging subsidies for students who can’t afford to pay for competitions Communicating with organizers to ensure disabled debaters are only assigned to rooms they can physically access at tournaments Ensuring that there are no conflicts of interest between judges and the teams they are assigned to adjudicate

Here is a list of functions I oppose:

Mandating that trigger warnings be given before speeches (thankfully, this practice is not ubiquitous) Vetoing debate topics on the grounds that they might prompt people to make offensive arguments

And here is a list of functions that I have a neutral or varying opinion on:

Constantly reminding people not to make sweeping generalizations about groups of people Mediating conflicts between students (some equity officers are horrible mediators, but I generally support the approach) Providing input on debate topics (when it is clear that students are not permitted to issue vetoes)

That’s a long list, but equity teams usually run pretty smoothly. I suspect that there are three reasons for this. First, equity’s power in debate is sufficiently limited. Judges do not penalize teams for the sole reason that a speaker said something “inequitable.” Equity teams cannot intervene in debate rounds (outside of a situation where one competitor is screaming targeted slurs or physically assaulting another), nor can they alter the results. Their most severe power of removing people from clubs and competitions is almost exclusively reserved for students who have committed crimes against other students (and those people usually resign anyway). When people perceive overreach, they complain loudly. Trigger-warning mandates for speakers have been greatly reduced because a number of people (including me) argued that they are ineffective.

Second, there are social incentives for equity officers to avoid doing stupid things. All equity officers are also debaters. It’s a bad idea to harshly punish someone for accidentally saying something offensive when you know you’ll have to spend an entire weekend with their friends. Equity officers are not above other students. This is sharply different from DEI trainings in the corporate world where a team of outside instructors assume a position of power over a given office or team.

Finally, the debate community assumes that people have good intentions. When conversations about ideological bias arise, conservatives and communists never accuse liberals of intentionally rigging rounds against them—they analyze the ways in which common unconscious biases cause judges to favor certain arguments.

And last in today’s roundup, an anonymous reader shares a diversity-training experience that caused him a lot of anxiety:

After years of teaching history at the college level, I took a job at an elite private high school, drawn in part by their stated goal of investing time, energy, and money in DEI education and initiatives. The school had a contract with a DEI-training company to educate all the faculty and administrators via a three-day retreat on race. My research and teaching has focused on race throughout my career. In a real sense, talking and writing about race is my job. Due to my personal and professional goals, I signed up to go.

We were immediately told by the facilitators that the purpose was not to train us in DEI but instead to have us spend the entire time reflecting on our own racial journeys. It was immediately clear that the space was designed to be a sort of deconstructed learning experience, where we were expressly forbidden from discussing the issue from the standpoint of research or debate. Instead we would discuss it at a personal level. Such ideas and stories, once shared, were subject to attack by the facilitators.

One white, female teacher was talkative and engaged in the first couple sessions, and the facilitators called her out for what they felt was a race-based domination of the space. Certainly, she’d made some “mistakes” in what she said about race, but the goal appeared to extract some kind of mea culpa. She meekly apologized and never spoke again.

Later, we were told with the utmost confidence that none of us talk about race in the classroom and that when the subject comes up we all shy away from it out of fear and cowardice. When a couple of teachers, including me, said that we were required to talk about race as part of the subjects we teach, this was met with a reiteration of the assertion that we do so reluctantly. The white facilitator then sat down cross-legged on the floor and spent an hour telling us how racist she was. I’m not being flip: The gist was that she once thought she wasn’t but then learned that she was and now understood that no matter how much she learned, she’d never escape her racist origin. She asked the whites in the room for their thoughts.

No one said anything for a long time. Then a white teacher started crying and said she'd been picked on for being poor and dark-skinned as a kid. The facilitators made it clear that this was the wrong answer.

On the final day, the most notable activity was one in which the group was split into white and people-of-color affinity groups. Afterward we came back to the main room and reflected. A Black teacher talked about positive stereotyping of Black people being just as reductive as negative stereotyping. I responded that this was something I've taught about in the case of the Middle East, saying that Orientalism not only perpetuates nasty things about Middle Eastern peoples (e.g. “All Muslims are sexist”) but posits supposedly good characteristics as uniform (e.g. “All Muslims are hospitable”). After a break, we came back together and the facilitators said that before we went on they wanted to tackle something.

Facilitators: “In the last session, you used the word ‘Orientalism.’ We want you to know that ‘Oriental’ is a very racist term to describe Asian people. But you put an -ism at the end and we wanted to ask what you meant by that.”

Me: “Um, well, ‘Orientalism’ refers to a group of scholars who called themselves ‘Orientalists’ because they studied the Middle East, and from the 1960s onward, were criticized by other scholars (especially Edward Said) for their reliance on Western biases.”

Facilitators: “Well, that is the scholarly, academic world. Here, in this space, ‘Oriental’ is a racist term. And we want you to reflect on that.”

Me: “I’m, um, sorry if anyone took it that way. In my work, this is a term we use to talk about racism …” [face red, heart racing]

Facilitators [interrupting]: “We’re out here, in this space. That space is academic. In this space, this is a space where ‘Oriental’ shouldn’t be said.”

I was fuming. To me, that exchange totally undermined any authority they had to speak on race, if they didn’t even know the primary word used to describe racism against Middle Eastern people. It doesn’t matter if people who are supposed to be experts in race have never heard of the term “Orientalism,” as if they missed the post-9/11 debates over Western biases against anyone deemed “Eastern”––I could lose my job over being called racist.

The Football Association will appeal against the length of former Crawley Town boss John Yems' ban for racist comments as it believes "a longer sanction" is appropriate.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Good morning, and welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained.

Today’s special guest is staff writer John Hendrickson, who has just published a new book, Life on Delay: Making Peace With a Stutter, which you can read an excerpt of here. John has written for The Atlantic about, among other topics, President Joe Biden’s stutter and, most recently, I Didn’t See You There, an experimental documentary about living with a disability that he calls “kinetic and compelling.” John will read anything by Richard Price, bought tickets for all five of The Walkmen’s upcoming NYC reunion shows, and has probably watched The Fugitive 50 times.

But first, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

What the longest study on human happiness found is the key to a good life How Noma made fine dining far worse Stop trying to ask “smart questions.”

The Culture Survey: John Hendrickson

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: I spent nearly a decade waiting and praying for The Walkmen to maybe someday reunite, doubting that it would ever happen. To me, they are the unsung heroes of the turn-of-the-millennium New York rock renaissance (think: The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio, Interpol—all the Meet Me in the Bathroom bands). Recently, when The Walkmen announced a five-night run in Manhattan in April, I impulsively bought tickets for all five shows. I will be screaming every word to every song.

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: After cycling through The Office, The Larry Sanders Show, Parks and Recreation, a slew of Ken Burns documentaries, and several seasons of Alone, my wife and I have started watching NewsRadio at night before we fall asleep. Again: Unsung! Every line Phil Hartman delivers is masterful. Stephen Root, of Barry and Office Space fame, does deadpan humor like no one else. And it’s a bit surreal to watch Joe Rogan in one of his early roles, playing a meathead named Joe.

An actor I would watch in anything: Bill Hader

My favorite blockbuster: The Fugitive is as close as you can get to a perfect—for lack of a better phrase—popcorn movie. Brisk pacing! Snappy dialogue! A few huge action sequences counterbalanced with grisled guys in frumpy suits working the phones! I’ve probably seen it 50 times. [Related: Hollywood doesn’t make movies like The Fugitive anymore.]

Best novel I’ve recently read: I’m currently reading Laura Zigman’s Small World, about two middle-aged sisters who move in together, bringing decades of family baggage into the house. I don’t want to give too much of it away, but I’m in awe of Zigman’s ability to weave biting humor and tenderness so closely together.

An author I will read anything by: Richard Price [Related: Two good old-fashioned young novelists]

A song I’ll always dance to: Le Tigre, “Deceptacon.” Hit play and try to keep your body still. It’s impossible!

“When the Walkmen announced a five-night run in Manhattan in April, I impulsively bought tickets for all five shows,” John says. Above: The band performing in Washington, D.C., in 2013 (Leigh Vogel / Getty for Thread)

My go-to karaoke song: Patti Smith, “Because the Night.” I’m a horrible singer, but singing is salvation for me. I like to belt this one out on a Friday or Saturday night at Montero’s, an old fisherman’s dive bar near the East River in Brooklyn. I usually throw in a kick when the pre-chorus starts. I write about this a little bit in my book, Life on Delay, but singing relies on a different part of the brain than we use for speaking, and I never stutter when I sing. It’s freeing. Scores of current or former stutterers have turned to music at some point in their lives: Elvis Presley, Kendrick Lamar, Carly Simon, Ed Sheeran, Bill Withers, Noel Gallagher—to name just a few.

My favorite sad song: Charles Bradley’s cover of Black Sabbath’s “Changes” absolutely slays me. It transcends what you think of as recorded music—it’s as if Bradley’s soul is imprinted on the track. The full backstory about Bradley and his mother around the time of the recording makes it all the more poignant.

My favorite angry song: Thee Oh Sees, “I Come From The Mountain.” Whenever I’m stressed or anxious, I crank this as loud as I possibly can and head-bang at my desk. Colson Whitehead told 60 Minutes that they’re on his writing playlist!

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: Annie Lowrey’s deeply vivid, personal account of her experience with pregnancy was the most memorable piece of journalism I read last year, full stop. It’ll stay with me forever.

A good recommendation I recently received: David Sims recently recommended to me the Apple series For All Mankind, sort of like Mad Men crossed with Apollo 13. [Related: How the space fantasy became banal]

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: Watch this clip from “The PriceMaster.” It’s one minute of your life. Trust me.

Read past editions of the Culture Survey with Gal Beckerman, Kate Lindsay, Xochitl Gonzalez, Spencer Kornhaber, Jenisha Watts, David French, Shirley Li, David Sims, Lenika Cruz, Jordan Calhoun, Hannah Giorgis, and Sophie Gilbert.

The Week Ahead

Maybe I Do, a romantic comedy starring Diane Keaton, Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon, Luke Bracey, William H. Macy, and Emma Roberts (in theaters Friday) Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, a posthumous book by David Graeber (Tuesday) The docuseries The 1619 Project, an expansion of the book by Nikole Hannah-Jones (first two episodes premiere Thursday on Hulu)

More in Culture

The film that accurately captures teen grief When good pain turns into bad pain This is the band that’s supposedly saving rock and roll? The calamitous lies of adulthood A slick mystery that takes place entirely on screens Skinamarink is a delightful nightmare. The line that Velma crossed

Catch Up on The Atlantic

The Supreme Court justices do not seem to be getting along. Despite everything you think you know, America is on the right track. How Joe Biden wins again

Photo Album

A snow leopard against a backdrop of the mountains of Ladakh in northern India (© Sascha Fonseca / Wildlife Photographer of the Year)

Check out some entries in this year’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest (and vote for your favorite).

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Chrissy Teigen and John Legend have welcomed a new child.

Ex-Crawley Town boss John Yems directed racist abuse towards his players, a panel finds.