Salon.com > Trey Ellis

The revolution will be hand-held

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 14:02:00 +0000

I proudly call myself a progressive but as a parent of school-aged kids, I’m often surprised by how culturally conservative I’ve become. I scoff at my thirteen-year-old’s full-body obsession with the British boy band, One Direction. And when she calls the recent movie Think Like a Man or any film starring Kate Hudson a “great film,” I lecture her for probably longer than the movie lasts on why the popular culture she claims to have been moved by -- in point of fact -- is absolute and total crap.

Did I mention that I’m a screenwriter?

Although I also write in other genres, writing for and about film and television has always been the focus of my writing career. Both socially and culturally, the movie theater has served as the climate-controlled center of my universe. My daughter’s world, on the other hand, revolves around whatever small screen she happens to be holding in her hand. Until recently, this seemed to me a sign of the coming apocalypse. But I’m beginning to realize that it might actually represent something more positive -- something big and revolutionary in the smallest possible package.

A single dad spills his secrets

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 15:01:00 +0000

Of course all dads love their daughters, but a single dad's bond is more complicated than that. Ever since my wife moved out seven years ago, leaving me to raise a 3½-year-old daughter and her 6-month-old brother Chet, I've been Ava's daddy and in some sense her mommy too. I reveled in the challenge of single parenting, smug in my holy martyrdom. I guess it runs in the family. My father raised me from the time I was 16, after my mother killed herself. Then, six years later, I nursed my dad through his short and losing battle with HIV. So by the time I was 22, I'd decided we Ellises were good at surmounting the seemingly insurmountable. If we were destined to be tragic heroes, I dedicated myself to being the best tragic hero ever. The most noble single dad in all of single dad-dom.

Somewhere along the line I think I forgot that raising kids was a marathon and not a dash. I foolishly believed that conscientious parenting covered zero to five years, and with that good base, the kids were set for life. They're in school now, my job is done, I tried to make myself believe.

The reality is that, as I write this, Ava will soon graduate from middle school, and I don't know if I've ever felt less prepared.

How does a single father ever get laid?

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 12:44:00 +0000

At the end of the day, I was bathing the kids, unloading much of a bottle of conditioner onto Ava's scalp so I could run the padded brush through her hair without making her cry. The explosion on top of her head is her most dramatic feature. When it's clean and out, she looks like a miniature Macy Gray, a mini-supermodel-rock star. She looks like her mother, Carmen. It was usually her mother or our weekday nanny who wrestled with Ava's hair, but I was slowly learning. In attempting a braid, I could only get through a turn or two before the hair rioted, so I'd just seal off the relatively controlled part with a barrette and let the rest poof out like fireworks. Almost always the braid would be high and outside, but Ava was sweet enough not to complain. Instead, while looking at herself in the mirror, she would tilt her head over her shoulder to center the poof and say, It's good, Daddy.

Black self-sabotage

Thu, 30 Nov 2000 20:22:00 +0000

Every other black person I know aches to write a book that will tell the rest of us what we've been doing wrong. I call it the "My People, My People" syndrome. You throw a dinner party and your black friends don't arrive till the risotto's cold -- "My people, my people." You go to the soul-food restaurant and the surly waitress forgets your order -- "My people, my people." No matter how many times we publicly "say it loud, we're black and we're proud," in private we're pretty hard on our own.

John McWhorter, associate professor of linguistics at the University of California-Berkeley, is hard on us in public in his new book, "Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America." He attempts to call a spade a spade, and more power to him. If only his reasoning weren't sometimes so reductive. The result is a collection of half-thought-through ideas that never bothers to truly tackle the complexities of post-civil-rights era America.

McWhorter reminds us of what every other black conservative has been reminding us of for decades: There exists within our community what he terms a "cult of victimology." McWhorter and his ideological forefathers Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell feel that a passive sense of whiny self-pity so pervades most of the rest of us black people that we've stopped trying to excel and instead wait around for whites to give us things (like entrance into elite universities).