| didn’t know I’d been allowed to be angry about that.” Irin’s perplexity, as a teenager, about why more women weren’t angry about things that it seemed they had every right and reason to be angry about, is discernible in a question she asked as a freshman journalist at the Harvard Crimson, while interviewing visiting speaker Andrea Dworkin three years before Dworkin’s death. “How do you save people who don’t think very much is wrong?” Irin had inquired of Dworkin. Dworkin’s response had been prophetic. “That’s where first-person testimony of women has been so important,” she’d said. “Because the mainstream will say ‘Oh, that doesn’t happen,’ and then a group of women will say, ‘Well, it happened to me.’ Yeah. Me too. That is what the movement had done. It had offered women the chance to hear from others that it had happened to them too, and that they too were angry, and that they too could say it aloud. Kristen Meinzer, the radio producer who’d leveled allegations at WNYC’s John Hockenberry, said in a conversation conducted by the Cut, that she felt “fortunate” for the women who’d first broken their silence on Weinstein, who’d helped create a world “where we’re allowed to be angry finally.” She went on, “I feel that for the longest time, we weren’t allowed to be furious. And my god, shouldn’t we all be enraged? And I don’t just mean the women in this room. But shouldn’t everybody be?” Yes, everyone should be. But it wasn’t |
gazed at her son’s dead body: “I saw his tongue had been choked out and was lying down on his chin. I saw that his eye was out and was lying about midway to his cheek. I looked at this eye and it was gone. I looked at the bridge of his nose and it looked like someone had taken a meat chopper and chopped it. And I looked at his teeth because I took so much pride in his teeth… and I only saw two… They’d been just knocked out, and I was looking at his ears… and I didn’t see the ear… That’s when I discovered a hole about here and I could see daylight on the other side… And I also discovered that they had taken an axe and they had gone straight down across his head and his face and the back of his head were separate.” Mamie Till recalled looking at the funeral director and saying “Oh yes, we’re gonna open the casket.” When he looked back and asked if he should try to fix Emmett’s features, she replied, “No, let the people see what I’ve seen.” The people saw. More than fifty thousand of them saw Emmett’s body—identifiable only because of a ring he wore—in person. They saw because Mamie Till, grieving the brutal murder of her child, insisted on having an open-casket funeral to which the public was invited. They saw because Mamie Till wanted the photos of his bloated, mutilated |
