Opinion: 2020 ‘dumpster fire’ year in culture

Editor’s Note: Sign up to get our new weekly column as a newsletter. In many ways, it already has.” Jones called it, in reference to waves of religious revival that have swept the US throughout its history, a “Great Awakening.” Aunjanue Ellis wrote that the reckoning – which eventually included the removal of Mississippi’s Confederacy-inflected flag – was long overdue for her home state and all of America: “The Confederate flag and its attendant horrors – the massacres, torture and lynchings – loom through every state of this country.” Many Americans asked whether – or how - this racial reckoning would be different. Keisha N. Blain offered a portrait of Mississippi activist Fannie Lou Hamer, for whom “women’s rights and Black voting rights were integral parts of realizing the ideals of American democracy.” Quoting Hamer’s famous line – “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free” – Blain wrote that as the “US marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment, Hamer’s words are as pertinent today as they were almost 50 years ago.” Senator Kamala Harris’s glass-ceiling-shattering election as Vice President in November made prescient these words written by Martha S. Jones for the Washington Post just before the centennial in August: “In the 55 years since the passage of the Voting Rights Act, Black women have earned, and insisted on, a place in American politics….Simply put, Black women are no longer a ‘first’ in politics — they are a force.” What will 2120 look like? Hemmer wrote that “as historical dramas, they offer an extra bit of comfort to make them easily bingeable in a year when we crave certainty: we know how the world will change after these women’s stories end, because it’s the world we’re living in…these stories, though fascinating and layered, nonetheless feel like comfort food, something familiar and interesting but not too challenging… More than that, these shows offer an on-ramp to critical thinking and more intense conversations about ambition, genius, intersectionality, motherhood and power… That flexibility explains, perhaps, why three shows have been so immensely popular: they speak to us, but not too loudly.” For Kate Maltby, the fourth season of “The Crown”, chronicling the lives of Queen Elizabeth II and her family, was as much about the history it leaves out – of everything from Margaret Thatcher’s handling of the Falklands War to the tempestuous marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Thanks, but let’s not Jane Greenway Carr: Nearly everything you thought you knew about George Washington is wrong Don’t miss: 2020 in the first person Dr. Prateek Harne: I am a soldier in this battle, and I am scared Allison Glock: Now I finally understand what my grandparents knew Sheetal Sheth: Cancer patients like me face a dystopian nightmare amid the virus Christy Oglesby: “I need white mamas to come running” Dr. Erica Farrand: ‘I can’t breathe’ is deeply personal Steven A. Holmes: I love the New York Times, but what they did was wrong Elana Rabinowitz: I teach public school.