Diana’s mother Hippolyta explains at the beginning of the film that humans were originally created to be “strong and passionate,” and Captain Trevor is both, and when it matters, he can use those qualities to support someone else.
.. Mr. Pine is working in a mode previously explored by Chris Hemsworth in “Ghostbusters” and Channing Tatum in pretty much everything — the preternaturally attractive man who wears his beauty lightly, who is both willing to be objectified and to make a joke of his objectification. A white, muscular man on the big screen isn’t exactly boundary-breaking, but even the acknowledgement that male bodies can be beautiful sometimes feels subversive, and an actor who’s willing to take a playful and self-aware attitude toward his own sexiness is a welcome break from a culture that frequently lays the heavy burden of hotness exclusively on women.
.. Captain Trevor is a reminder that masculinity itself isn’t the problem.
.. he remains masculine throughout the movie in a fairly traditional sense — his masculinity just allows for supporting a powerful (O.K., superpowerful) woman, rather than undercutting or resenting her.
.. it’s also important for boys and men to see a man who becomes heroic by following a woman’s lead.
Putting the Power of Self-Knowledge to Work
“I think when people look back at our time, they will be amazed at one thing more than any other,” she writes. “It is this — that we do know more about ourselves now than other people did in the past, but that very little of this knowledge has been put into effect.”
.. childhood trauma — so-called adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs — substantially increase risks for a range of negative outcomes, including dropping out of school, abusing drugs, becoming depressed, committing suicide, and being a victim of, or a perpetrator, of violence or abuse.
.. ACEs are common. Close to one in four people has three or more of these experiences, and they are far more prevalent among people under age 55.
.. And later, in the absence of healthy options, the way they cope with the pain, anxiety or shame is often by self-medicating. Nicotine is a great anti-anxiety medication, and the first prescription antidepressants were methamphetamines.”
.. There’s so much historic trauma in tribal communities,” she said. “Traditionally, children were seen as sacred beings and abuse was nonexistent.” But generations of displacement and discrimination, including the practice of removing tribal children from their families and placing them in boarding schools, where neglect and abuse were common, has contributed to persistently high rates of alcoholism, drug use and incarceration.
.. Usually, we’re so focused on the symptom level — addiction, abuse, disease,”
.. At present, the department’s recidivism rate — which it defines as committing a felony and returning to prison within three years — is 32 percent. Becker-Green’s goal is to lower it to 25 percent by 2020.
Trump, The Man and the Image
His words increasingly signify his confusion about who he is and what he has got himself into.
The result ain’t oratory. Still, the words entertain, wound, outrage, delight, bemuse, stupefy. More than a year into Trump’s candidacy, they also signify the speaker’s confusion about who he is and what he has got himself into.
.. The praise Trump elicits from voters for his “authenticity,” for “telling it like it is,” elides the fact that he is committed to hiding his human side from the world and, for that matter, from himself. “I don’t like to analyze myself because I might not like what I see,” he confessed to one of his biographers, Michael D’Antonio.
.. A man in touch with his emotions would recognize that in regard to this circumstance his emotions are mixed.
One remarkable revelation was an account published online, in March, by Stephanie Cegielski, the former communications director of the Make America Great Again super pac. Cegielski told of being informed by colleagues, in March, 2015, that Trump would be running for President, with the goal of polling at, say, twelve per cent, and finishing second in the delegate count. (“A protest candidacy.”)
.. At some point, it will hit his followers that they’ve been sold out by a huckster who coveted their votes only for the sake of his colossal self-regard. And that, all along, he had nothing real to offer.
When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 6
When researchers sent young whites and blacks out to interview for low-wage jobs in New York City armed with equivalent résumés, the result was:
A) Whites and blacks were hired at similar rates.
B) Blacks had a modest edge because of affirmative action.
C) Whites were twice as likely to get callbacks.
The answer is C, and a black applicant with a clean criminal record did no better than a white applicant who was said to have just been released from 18 months in prison.
.. In a CNN poll, 86 percent of blacks said family breakdown was a reason for difficulties of African-Americans today, and 77 percent cited “lack of motivation and unwillingness to work hard.”
.. the median black household in America still has only 8 percent of the wealth of the median white household.
.. The average white or Asian-American student attends a school in at least the 60th percentile in test performance; the average black student is at a school at the 37th percentile.
.. In one study, researchers sent thousands of résumés to employers with openings, randomly using some stereotypically black names (like Jamal) and others that were more likely to belong to whites (like Brendan). A white name increased the likelihood of a callback by 50 percent.
.. white state legislators, Democrats and Republicans alike, were less likely to respond to a constituent letter signed with a stereotypically black name. Even at universities, emails sent to professors from stereotypically black names asking for a chance to discuss research possibilities received fewer responses.
.. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, an eminent sociologist, calls this unconscious bias “racism without racists,” and we whites should be less defensive about it.
.. The N.B.A. study caused a furor (the league denied the bias), and a few years later there was a follow-up by the same economists, and the bias had disappeared. It seems that when we humans realize our biases, we can adjust and act in ways that are more fair. As the study’s authors put it, “Awareness reduces racial bias.”