46 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019
director of discrimination. She had fired
a black staff member, after which sev-
eral others left in protest. The director
was forced out, at which point she turned
around and sued Transition House for
discriminating against her because she
was white. The shelter subsequently
arranged for its staff to participate in
anti-racism training sessions, and held
long, wrenching discussions in which it
was made clear to the white staff that
the black staff were unhappy and not
being listened to.
Part of the issue was the shelter’s cul-
ture of never making anything explicit.
So many things were left unsaid that
there was an assumption that everyone
just somehow understood what was ex-
pected of her, which masked an assump-
tion that everyone thought more or less
alike. “I didn’t really see this until years
later, when I went to work in a family
literacy program,” Carole Sousa says. “I
was turning my job over to an Afri-
can-American woman, and she kept
asking me, ‘What do you do, and what
is this expectation,’ and I kept saying to
her, ‘You can do it however you want,’
but she kept pushing me. And finally I
realized that, for her, you have to un-
derstand exactly what these white peo-
ple want, because if you do what you
want it might come back at you as, You’re
not a good fit.”
Eventually, Transition House suc-
ceeded in hiring and keeping a diverse
staff, but this did not put racial conflict
to rest. “The only way that good change
happens is through conflict,” Sarah
Gyorog, Transition House’s current di-
rector, says. “So damn right we had
conflict about race. Are you kidding me?
I’m glad we had conflict, and are forced
to acknowledge it, and know that rac-
ism is the air we breathe.” The tension
over the shelter’s relationship to the crim-
inal-justice system persisted, but it had
to persist—that was the nature of the
problem. “We definitely need the police,
but people in prison are victims, too, and
they are going to come back, and how
do we want them to be back?” Gyorog
says. “We want them to be able to have
a relationship without holding power
over someone, and prison is not going
to deliver that. Black feminists knew
that the criminal-justice system was not
a panacea, and they were saying it, andthe white feminists were not listening.
Black feminism looks at how you can’t
take a batterer out of a situation and ex-
pect it not to have a ripple effect on the
rest of the community. But through the
white lens it was: just take these batter-
ers out and everything will get better.”W
hen Grace was in her early twen-
ties, in 2006, living in her native
city in southern China, she met a man
online, who had emigrated from her
city to Boston with his parents when
he was a child. (Grace is a pseudonym.)
Despite the distance, he pursued her on
video chat. For four years, they spoke
every day for two hours, and once a year
he came to China for a month to visit.
He was very sociable, talking with her
mother for hours, and he took Grace
out to restaurants. She grew to love him,
and she thought he must be in love, too,
to spend so much time courting her. He
told her that if she came to America he
would pay for her to go to college. He
applied to get her a visa, and she moved
to Boston to live with him and his par-
ents. They married a few days after she
arrived, and soon she was pregnant.
Right away she noticed that in Bos-
ton he was different. He seemed to have
no friends. He made a good income as
a computer engineer, but he hated to
spend money and gave her just twenty
dollars a month. He was angry all the
time. At first, he and his father had ter-
rible fights, but soon he turned to crit-
icizing her, as did his parents. They
seemed to fight less among themselves
once they had her to blame.
While she was pregnant, her hus-
band and his parents were nicer, but
after she had the baby, a girl, things got
much worse. They didn’t allow her to
go out of the house without one of them
as a chaperon. She asked him about
going to college, as he had promised,
but he told her that it was her duty to
take care of the baby and his parents.
He allowed her to call her mother in
China, but his parents often listened to
her conversations. If she spoke to them,
they told her she was being impudent,
so she tried not to speak. The only out-
sider she was allowed to talk to was an
elderly woman next door.
From early in the morning until late
at night, Grace did chores. She swept
the floor three times a day and mopped