Apr 26, 2021
What Home Staging Showed Me About Housing in America
Home staging is a privileged kind of precariousness.
Home staging is a privileged kind of precariousness.
Every time I tell a customer that we’re not open for browsing, I know I am reminding them of how Covid-19 has disrupted our rhythms and routines, robbed us of numerous small pleasures.
As someone with over ten years in the industry, I still make $4.95/hour—plus tips.
When this pandemic is over, we hope to reopen our doors and offer comfort and sanctuary to our communities—as women of color so often have.
We think of explorers in terms of what they discovered—the Eureka moment, not the search. The search is imperfect and frustrating and owes you nothing.
The more I wrote about women, the more distanced I felt from the figure I saw in the mirror.
It’s not my job to absorb every feeling a man has. In my classroom, I am the one who decides whose feelings get airtime, and how they are shared.
Others began to intrude in what had once been a mom-and-pop operation. The conversion from hobby to profession had been made.
There will always be liars in the focus group, but Fred was never one of them.
It’s happened for the past three days now. A three-day streak definitely qualifies it as A capitalized Thing.
As a black man in the field of social work, my dad was, as a white female coworker of his once put it, “like a fly in buttermilk.”
After I left, everything became clearer, in the way that a breakup can clarify a toxic relationship; put things in sharp relief.
“I take these photographs so she’ll be able to remember the time when she had two heartbeats. Tears bucket down her face.”
Dance is about freeing ourselves, finding a secret space inside our bodies that no lock can close.
When we conflate men’s sexuality with harassment and violence, we don’t ask much of them. Masculinity doesn’t have to be toxic.
“What leads a man to transact with death for his daily bread?”
I couldn’t stop thinking about what I would do if something went wrong. If I made a mistake, my son and I might go back to being homeless.
I wish I could tell my dad that I worked to recreate the newsroom. That people still think newspaper stories—and stories about newspapers—are worth telling.
“So long as men can harass women without consequences, they will continue to do so.”
“All I knew was that if my Pops could work hard and pull himself up out of poverty, I could, too.”
