What’s new with me these days, you don’t ask but I don’t care so I’m going to tell you?
Not much. I stay busy. I’m really enjoying my summer. I’m taking just one grad class in preparation for a fall semester that may destroy my soul leading up to a spring semester that may bury me so deeply that even a zombified-Ginny could never make it back to the surface.
I’ve been catching up on my reading. I’ve been taking small trips with my teen daughter to visit shows and museums in Columbus, Richmond, and Philadelphia so far. I swim in my sister’s pool. I catch the local exhibits, festivals and shows. Try restaurants new to me and old favorites. Try to be inspired to write a second novel.
Summer Ginny is happy and relaxed and has low anxiety. Autumn Ginny? You’re gonna hear her screaming all the way out in Coraopolis and your dogs are gonna FREAK.
Let’s talk, first about some heavy stuff and then we’ll get into the fun stuff!
1. The Hillman family’s links to slavery
There aren’t a whole lot of options open to you when it is written that your family fortune was amassed in part due to ancestral usage of slave labor. This is the situation in which Pittsburgh’s philanthropic Hillman family recently found themselves thanks to a new book arguing for slavery reparations. The book, The Stolen Wealth of Slavery: A Case for Reparations by journalist David Montero, spends a considerable amount of words tying the modern Hillman fortune to slavery (yes, I purchased the book; you can read a breakdown of what he reveals about the Hillman ancestors here.)
In the book, Montero mentions that the Hillman family never responded to his requests for comment; as far as I can tell, they maintained this silence until the book was published recently and local media outfits began seeking comment. Their response was partly good and also, eh, not good.
The good part, which is the second half of the statement:
“For generations, the Hillman family and their foundations have had a long enduring commitment to supporting our diverse community through philanthropic giving and civic engagement. Since the 1950s, they have had a direct role in supporting many organizations and causes that benefit Black communities. This commitment is borne from a sense of trust, friendship, and mutual respect. They are proud of their contributions and relationships and plan to build on both for generations to come.”
Good. But let’s jump back to the first paragraph of their statement:
“Without question, slavery was a tragic part of American history. Regrettably, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ancestors of the Hillman family were among the hundreds of thousands of people whose businesses relied on the labor of enslaved people."
Let me unpack for you why I view this to be a problematic response:
A minor quibble before I get to the bigger issues: “Regrettably” is not the same as an expression of active regret. In the same way the Hillman family is tied to their ancestors in this shameful way, many modern Americans are tied to enslaved ancestors in a heartbreaking way. Those ties don’t simply snap as people die; legacy ripples long after in good and bad ways, and the fact is, the money the Hillmans enjoy today exists in part because of slavery. It’s okay for them to say, “We acknowledge and deeply regret the actions of our slave-owning ancestors whose wealth laid the foundation for our modern endowments.”
“Were among” “people whose businesses relied”: the passivity here serves as an attempt to remove the agency of the Hillman ancestors to install them as passive players in a story in which they were active and willing participants. And worse, this statement says that it wasn’t Hillman ancestors that relied on the enslaved laborers, it was their businesses, you see. It wasn’t that Hillman ancestors enjoyed personal freedoms, comfort and prosperity afforded to them by the wealth generated by enslaved laborers, it was THE BUSINESSES that benefitted from this enslavement. A better statement maintains the active voice and directly implicates the real players who were actually driving the plot that robbed other players of their agency via enslavement, turning them into the victims of the story.
“ancestors of the Hillman family were among the hundreds of thousands of people”: How unnecessary. Whether they intended it to or not, here’s how this statement reads: Hey, it wasn’t just us who were amassing wealth by enslaving other humans! It was lots of other people! In fact, I’ll ballpark it for you! HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS. And we were just one family. It reads to me as an attempt to inject even the smallest rationalization into a statement that called for none because there is none. We are long removed from the attempted justification phase and are now in the phase of determining whether past wrongs were ever truly righted, and if not, how to go about it—perhaps reparations, as argued by the author and others, or planned giving to Black groups and communities, as argued by the Hillman family in this statement.
I am not here to argue for one or the other; that debate is a long way from being settled. I am here to say the statement given to the media by the Hillman family fell far far short of adequate. And they deserve to be called out for it.
From now on, I hope they will remove any HINT of rationalization from any statement ever given on this matter, and having done that, they will go back through it a second time to remove any passivity that was injected in loyalty to ancestors whose slave-generated legacy money they continue to enjoy. Then once those things are gone, recognize that that same ancestral pull also exists between modern-day Black Americans and their long-gone enslaved relatives. From this state of mind, they can then ask honestly, how do we respond sincerely and have we done our earnest best to repair the damage, even if we didn’t create it ourselves?
I don’t know what the answers are, but at least those questions will generate progress.
2. Let’s just fight
Today in “stupid hills to die on” is the forthcoming 2025 redesign for the Pennsylvania license plate.
Let me show you the old one versus the new one:
As you can imagine, everyone loves this new design and there is no debate whatsoever and unicorns are soaring over the mountains, farms and hills of Pennsylvania pooping actual rainbows of love and harmony and Skittles.
Of course that’s not true. What’s true is that there are people that like it and there are people screaming of Pittsburgh erasure. People screaming it’s too Philadelphian. I guess those are kind of the same thing? Others say the design looks like a fourth-grader made it in MS Paint, which, no. The CURRENT license plate, however, definitely looks like something a monkey made in Microsoft Word in five minutes all …
Then there’s City Paper’s Colin Williams who went on a screed about the new plate, claiming Gettysburg has more treasured historical significance than the bell, that most people west of Harrisburg don’t even feel a “scintilla of identification with the poorly made bell,” that the design is akin to trying to represent all of Pennsylvania with the Cathedral of Learning (lol not even close; sit down with this), that red, white and blue are “played out,” that the slogan “let freedom ring” doesn’t work because the bell is “forever silenced” (also lol) and is a “hackneyed symbol” (like how? What? How? WHAT?) that will do little to get people to visit the state. In tweeting out the link to the op-ed, City Paper called the license plate design “tired jingoism.”
Oh for crying out loud.
I get that it’s probably just click-bait, and that I fell for it, but still, even in this our modern political age when patriotism has been weaponized within the political thunderdome, this reaction to what is actually a perfectly fine plate design is simply bonkers.
The old plate design wasn’t just hilariously bad, it was mostly meaningless and completely hidden by anyone who had a license plate frame, leaving nothing but a white plate and blue sans-serif numbers and letters. Now we will have a new plate that points to how Pennsylvania was INDEED where this whole American experiment was born. Be that we all feel somewhat on the verge of that experiment failing on us for one reason or another, this plate is fitting. “Let freedom ring” should not be viewed as simply a callback to a storied past; it is a present-tense declaration and should be viewed as a call to action that enmeshes our Commonwealth’s historical moral center with a continual effort to be/become a state where freedom flourishes, not a state where we try to swim against the tides of progress.
The historian in me wants to remind you (and Colin) that Pittsburgh and other parts of our state were dangerously close to being part of Virginia rather than Pennsylvania, so much so that Fort Pitt for a time was overtaken and renamed Fort Dunmore. Had that happened, we would not have our cherished legacy of a free-state city that became famed for its vitriolic hatred of slavery, but would have instead belonged to the state with the most slaves, fighting eventually not for the Union, but the Confederacy.
Why didn’t we become Virginia? Mostly because of a little thing called the American Revolution, which connects to the Liberty Bell, which once hung in Independence Hall and which, by the way, was first called the Liberty Bell by slavery abolitionists. Full circle! The Liberty Bell indeed checks all the boxes and it applies to the whole state on several levels, and if you don’t think it does, you haven’t bothered to learn your history outside of a few Google searches you did in service to bias. The new plate is well-designed, eye-pleasing, uses a serif font reminiscent of those seen in our most treasured historical documents (see Steelers block numbers to understand why font matters), and the cream color does a nice job of suggesting history too. My only quibble is that it doesn’t illustrate the entirety of the bell; not sure why they cut part of it off.
That said, it’s still just a license plate and a few “Welcome to Pennsylvania” signs. If you’ve ever ever ever ever ever made a decision to visit a state based on the design of their license plate, I’m gonna need you to leave the room before your lying ass growing Pinocchio nose shatters a window.
That is until Texas’ license plate changes to, “Death awaits.”
Speaking of a democracy …
3. Let’s just vote
As I told you in a previous edition, the Riverhounds are creating a professional women’s soccer team based in Pittsburgh and the vote is now open to choose the name of the team!
Your choices:
Some strong choices here. Let’s discuss them:
While Confluence would make us all drunk all the time from playing my confluence drinking game, it would also be a hell of a team to have to create a mascot for, right? Can’t be a pirate, because we already have those. I don’t think a keelboatwoman would be striking too much fear in the hearts of opponents. I guess you could go with a river monster of some sort, which would be badass. Oooh, maybe a B-52 ghost bomber pilot??
Renegades is my least favorite because it calls to mind the Steelers too much for me. Not to mention that there is a youth hockey team here called the Ice Renegades. So yeah, no to this one. You are the weakest link, goodbye.
Riveters is my favorite. It gives Rosie the Riveter female-strength vibes but can also translate into some badass Flashdance-type vibes while allowing a play on the word riveting. The name also pairs syllabically well with Riverhounds.
Is syllabically a word even? Let’s say it is.
Strikers works on several levels from soccer strikers, to striking metal while it’s hot which links nicely to our industrial past, but I don’t love it as a name for a Pittsburgh team because it makes me think too much of labor strikes. This may just be because I recently spent a heck of a lot of time researching Pittsburgh’s labor history. Either way, meh to this.
So my choices in order are Riveters, Confluence, Strikers, and Renegades.
Go vote here! You have a week left. If Renegades or Strikers win, in the words of Prince Humperdink, I shall be very put out.
Don’t disappoint me, farm boy.
4. Let’s just not pack grenades in with our underwear
I have said this here a kajillion times but you’re going to hear it again … I once had a pair of tweezers confiscated by the TSA. TWEEZ. ERS. What can you even do with tweezers except groom someone against their will?
And you know what that did to me in a post-9/11 world? It made me extra extra cautious about being exactly sure what I can and can’t carry or pack when I’m traveling by air because the rules always change.
My ex-husband would regularly stress me out with the stuff he would shove in our luggage for our regular trips down to Mexico to visit his family. Once he packed into our suitcase a black box of a car part that had wires and shit coming out of it so his father could repair the family car for cheaper than he would purchasing the part in Mexico. I took one look at this thing that was about three modifications away from being a whole ass bomb and I said, “You are brown and therefore we are for sure going to be in airport jail by 4 p.m.”
Guess what? Nothing happened. The bag arrived in Mexico with no issues. But still, I continue to take the time to make sure I know the current rules. For my trip to Ireland, I made sure the scissors I packed had blades smaller than one inch because I didn’t need some 1.3 inch blades being the reason I got pulled out of line and scolded for being secretly murderous.
And there’s this:
Two grenades were found in a checked bag at the Pittsburgh International Airport on Tuesday morning.
Now, surely these were like play grenades, right? Or decor made to look like grenades for people with terrible decorating taste? No, as seen in this pic from the TSA, they were actual grenades:
Thankfully they were inert, but here’s the thing, doofi, no, you can’t take even inert grenades on a plane and common sense should tell you why!
So you’re wondering why this dude thought this was okay and wouldn’t set off 700 bells and whistles and alarms and dogs? Did he even bother to take two seconds to Google it?
Friends—out there driving off cliffs hoping you’ll follow them, and telling you to take grenades on a plane.
Unbelievable.
Anyway, I’m off to Google, “Okay take protein powder luggage or TSA think cocaine?”
5. Random n’at
My musician pal Randy Baumann of the DVE Morning Show (and a whole lot of do-gooding on behalf of local sick children), has an album out and it is so good and I’m not just saying that because he’s my friend. Strong vocals that stand out in the foreground of catchy songs. As the yutes say, “isa bop.” Did I do that right? My favorite songs are When a Man’s Down and Home Again. Go give them all a listen wherever you get your music these days including Spotify and Apple Music and more. Not an ad!
Public Source’s followup to the hilariously bad Pittsburgh-bashing piece by the animal psychic/astrologer comes from a professional writer who returned for a class reunion after being raised here and moving away 40 years ago. It’s worthy of a read to see how it looks to those who left and thought they never wanted to look back.
A local shirt that is new to me and I just love it so much comes from Steel City.
The way I cackled*. Not an ad!
Next week I’m going to try to find the space and time to really dive into the history behind my latest for Pittsburgh Magazine, which I shared last week. In the meantime, if you haven’t yet, read it here. A peak:
*Title of my future memoir and my gravestone epitaph
6. That’s all!
That’s all for this week! Be kind! Buy my book! Don’t melt in the heat! Don’t litter! Watch for bike riders! Git a hoss! I have no band name this week because you should just go listen to Randy’s album!
See you soon and let freedom ring!