The first email is the email that Spector sent to Donna Hayashi-Smith, Registrar/Collections Manager of the White House who reached out to the Guggenheim in September 2017 to request a loan of a Vincent Van Gogh in the Thannhauser Collection, Landscape. Spector instead offered the White House Maurizo Cattelan’s America, a golden toilet which had been in use at the Guggenheim during its exhibition. (It’s since disappeared.) Spector notably, publicly and privately, cannot stand Trump, despite the fact that they have more in common than she thinks. There’s an entire backstory to this loan request, how it was handled and aftermath that I’m going to refrain from including here, but the story and this email are strong examples of Spector’s poor leadership. The cutesy, fuck-you reply which won her lots of rah-rahs from liberal White women who galvanized to help her save her job was a poorly thought out stunt which a Black woman would’ve absolutely been fired for. Lewis for some reason, fails to consider this as to why the Guggenheim Board of Trustees finally decided to call time on Spector’s tenure. The ineptness of Spector’s decision making skills are never called to the mat — and there are too many examples here to name — but I am made to be responsible for a then 61 year-old woman losing a job that quite possibly, may have been too overwhelming for her, for the era and time that we are now in. Again — I cannot imagine a Black woman sending this correspondence to the White House and still keeping her job. And certainly not at the Guggenheim, though they do seem to have a stomach for Black women engaging in conspiracy at their behest, so long as no one finds out. But that’s exactly the difference: Ashley James is acting, with permission, on behalf of the Guggenheim board, curatorial staff, director, communications team and certainly her then-boss, Spector, to violate laws. Spector, however, was acting as a rogue agent, which is why she almost lost her job when the White House leaked the news to Fox News in January 2018.

Lewis perhaps was unable to analyze Spector’s email or the gravity of the situation with the criticality that it deserved, because she also speaks the same language of cutesy, fuck-you. It’s a language that I often call “White Woman, Girl Boss.” Lewis, like Spector, has never been held accountable for the race-baiting, trans-hating, poorly researched and poorly written pablum that she’s written over the years; in fact, she has failed upward, just like Spector. After publishing “The Guggenheim’s Scapegoat”, Goldberg then allowed Lewis to publish a blog post, TK endorsing Elon Musk’s chaotic leadership at Twitter that advertisers have paused, corporations have lost millions in marketshare within 48 hours of a disastrous verified account scheme, and the use of the N-word soared 500% within 24 hours of the news of Musk buying the site. Again, Lewis is allowed to traffic in a little light facism (as a treat) and race-baiting racism (as propaganda) because Goldberg, who had all the heat for Kanye West’s similar behavior, deputizes her to do the same, but in Girl Boss. Perhaps Goldberg isn’t fluent in “White Women, Girl Boss” which is a shame but also makes more sense why these disasters keep happening on his call. I write more about the leadership failures of Goldberg’s endorsement here, in “The Jewish Factor and Jeffrey Goldberg’s Failures.”

Lewis and Spector also know that people will protect, excuse and enable this form of speaking and communicating. Richard Armstrong enabled Nancy Spector, and Jeffrey Goldberg enables Helen Lewis. Lewis and Spector both know that we as a society are deeply unable and afraid of making White women accountable for their racism, violence and weaknesses, because they understand that they are a concession, a moral buffer in the moral binary of White and Black Pathologies. White women are the allegedly the best, morally, that White people have to offer, and due to their marginalized position as women, are, within cis-heterosexual patriarchy, the most capable diplomats to sort of “reason” with the other Others within the system(s). This is of course, falls apart when we consider that White women can be, and sometimes are, the worst perpuarators of patriarchy and harms, and often are more likely to replicate the dynamics of racialized violence than they are to disrupt it. They merely put a pussy hat on top of it all, and call it Girl Boss.

It’s a language that White women excel at, for it is written in a passive voice, is passive-aggressive, provides plausible deniability and lacks the ownership and verve of power of a woman who knows what that is. This language’s power is mostly located in its victimhood, and its ability to evade accountability, thus rendering anyone that calls time on the machinations of the language, an agent in locating and creating the victim, the most active voice in the language. This is the construct of both Lewis’s and Spector’s emails. They know exactly what they’re doing. Spector knows that she’s trying to humiliate the White House, because she knows she’s not brave enough to actually take on the White House. Lewis knows that she’s trying to bully me into an interview, because she knows she’s in over her head and unqualified for the story that she’s taken on. It’s not surprising that the editor on the email, who is also endorsing Lewis, is a White woman, Adrienne LaFrance. It’s just a mess of leadership all around and recalls this Substack by journalist (and former correspondence for The Atlantic) James Fallows in which he essentially writes that mainstream media cannot meet us in the current moment that we’re in, for if it could have, it would’ve already done so. But the crisis in media and The Atlantic has been sounding for some time, if you include this essay, “I Left My Career in Prestige Media Because of the Shitty Men in Charge and They Are Still In Charge and Still Fucking Up.” by Jennifer Barnett, a former Managing Editor of The Atlantic who was pushed off a cliff at (by?) the publication. It’s absolutely worth a read; I won’t spoil it for you. “The Guggenheim’s Scapegoat” seems to be a sort of crisis canary in the coal mine, but it won’t be mainstream news that records the S.O.S.

And it certainly won’t be mainstream media that cracks the code of what happened on my exhibition, what happened afterwards at the Guggenheim or the “reckoning” of 2020. They’re unable to. They simple, as I told Lewis