Thirteen Notes on Legitimate
A listed meditation, plus two readings in Colorado
It’s been several weeks since my last post; a shift of seasons brings a shift in approach. I begin a series of meditations on words. This is, after all, the Church of Language. Word #1: legitimate.
This word came up while performing bibliomancy (divination by book) with Until Our Lungs Give Out: Conversations on Race, Justice, and the Future by George Yancy. The book is structured as a series of interviews between Yancy and other trenchant thinkers—Noam Chomsky, Mari Matsuda, Judith Butler, Akwugo Emejulu, many more. I asked for a message and was pointed to a passage by historian Eric Forner. In talking about the 2021 January 6 attack on the US Capital, Forner speaks of two historical precedents: the 1873 Colfax Massacre in Louisiana and the Wilmington coup of 1898. In all three, armed white men (and, in 2021, white women) violently seized or attempted to seize (2021) control of a governing body. A common thread between these events, notes Forner, is an “inability or unwillingness to accept African Americans as legitimate members of American society, and to accept African American votes as legitimate.”
Since the mid-15th century, legitimate often referred to a “lawfully begotten” child—a babe born of parents legally married. Not a bastard. A legitimate child inherited their parent’s property. (Do you see the heir in inherit?) The “lawful” part of legitimate brings words like right and moral, justified and kind into legitimate’s connotative surround.
Is a list essay still tinged as a less legitimate form? The list essay shows its gaps and leaps. It asks the reader to work with the writer by noticing the connections between the items. The list gathers under the title, which names the collection. I call this list notes and open a pressure valve, giving myself permission to write toward by inviting the reader into my process. Of notes points to the essay’s incompleteness, to that which is also being left out, and to me this feels more honest, too. I am not writing to create a “master work” (ugh, vomit in my mouth at that word), but rather an invitation. To think and breathe with me.
Legalizing same-sex marriage legitimatized homosexuality in the eyes of the state, and this is what upsets so many so-called Christians. I write this sentence and my younger sister calls. She’s the sibling I’m closest to, and unlike a stranger, she knows, like I do, that Mom’s faith is real, even as Mom still can’t accept me as gay, queer, lesbian or whatever word I use that day, Mom thinks if I’m not hetero, I’m deceived. I’ve been out to Mom for over twenty years, and she still thinks I’m living a lie. Yet I keep hoping—like a person of faith—for her full acceptance, and I want to be honest with her. So it felt weird not to tell her about my new girlfriend, Jill. And Mom went silent with disapproval. This is painful; every time, it’s painful—how her homophobia keeps us apart. It was painful, too, to feel my family’s ‘tolerant’ acceptance several years ago at cousin’s wedding where another cousin, his brother and a pastor, spoke about how Christian marriage was “real” marriage because it was sanctioned by God, not the State. This was after Obergefell v. Hodges in which the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment requires states to license and recognize same-sex marriage. Legitimate: from Latin legitimus “lawful,” originally “fixed by law, in line with the law.”
In Wilmington, a duly elected biracial city government was violently overthrown by white supremacists. Two thousand armed white men ran Black and white political leaders (the elected Fusionists) out of town, burned Black businesses and homes, including the only Black newspaper, and killed a verified fourteen Black people, though most accounts number the dead between sixty and three hundred. Coup leaders established themselves in political positions and stayed there for decades, presumably perceived, by themselves as others, as legitimate.
No, enslaved people in the United States weren’t allowed to marry. Legally, they were considered property, not people. Likewise, anti-miscegenation laws legitimated some kinds of love (and people) and not others. It’s important to remember this—to keep it within our field of perception. In The Miracle of the Black Leg, scholar Patricia Williams traces the difference between contract law (think property, the private contract) and constitutional law (think civil rights, the polis, the social body) as a tension at the root of neoliberalism. What happens when humans are reduced to homo-economicus—an object or data-point to be bought and sold—and we’re told our lives should be governed by markets, so that a “healthy” or “legitimate” hospital, university, or person is defined by their ability to make money, not by the creation of healthy people, educated citizens, a meaningful life.
In an online training, civil rights advocate Maryam Love defined a legitimate government as one whose authority comes from its people. The people vote—in Missouri, for example, for Amendment 3, which declared that the state cannot “deny or infringe upon a person’s fundamental right to reproductive freedom.” Politicians responded by writing a confusing ballot measure that would overturn the people’s will while seeming to affirm it. So the ACLU filed a lawsuit, and a court ordered the politicians (a white, male, Republican majority) to rewrite their initiative, which will appear on the 2026 ballot. Meanwhile, the courts also initially delayed abortion care despite Amendment 3, because of other laws and litigation still on the books. Now it looks like a person can get an abortion in some parts of Missouri (earlier TRAP laws had restricted access). And listen: I’m usually good at navigating resources and legalities, but even I’m confused about what a person can or cannot do in Missouri regarding their body and reproductive freedom. It seems the confusion is the point.
There’s a definition of legitimacy meaning “genuine” or “real.” One time, the Press I ran (Les Figues) didn’t receive a grant because the funder said we didn’t publish “real” poetry.
Jill and I talk about the danger of deciding that some humans are legitimate people and others aren’t. At the No Kings protest this weekend, I told a white man I liked his shirt. It said: no hierarchy among humans. The first time my friend Connie told me about Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy (now Lilith’s Brood), I was standing in my Florida backyard, surrounded by air plants—Spanish moss hanging from the cedar, Tillandsia utriculata attached to a palm. More recently, Connie emailed me about Butler, correcting my original version of this note while still urging me to read the trilogy. In Butler’s books, an alien species, the Oankali, regard the human proclivity for hierarchy as a fatal flaw—offset, as Connie notes, by “an unbelievable talent unique to humans. Cancer. The ability to mutate cells.” Butler, Connie reminds me, was a keen observer of the rise of neoliberalism under Reagan and Thatcher, and her archive is open to the public. To question hierarchy doesn’t mean that all opinions carry the same weight. Some people are more experienced, practiced, and skillful—and the further you sit from the center of power, the more you can see the whole. Hierarchy is one way to place species, including people, in relation to each other, but there are other configurations—other patterns, including networks, webs, and veins. At the No Kings protest in Lincoln, I liked saying hi to Jill’s mom, who was there with a sign, whooping as cars honked.
Is authority held through force legitimate? I think about my experience parenting, teaching, or supervising employees. Someone might do what you say, but you cannot bully someone into respecting you. The authority of dictate imposters as leadership. You cannot order someone to legitimately respect you.
I turn to the most “authoritative” dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary, for more about this history of this word: legitimate. Under the first definition, the earliest recorded usage, is from Knyghthode & Bataile (“Knighthood and Battle”), an English war book attributed to John Neele, circa 1460. I read the passage several times, look up words in a middle English dictionary.
“This werk they calle a dike tumultuary; To stynte a rore, and if the foo be kene, Legytymat dykinge…is necessary.”
Kene is “brave” and tumultuary is “raised hastily.” Rore relates to the modern roar and uproar. You’re trying to protect yourself from a tumult, a violence that’s coming toward you. And I know it’s an “illegitimate” read, but I like the sounded suggestion that to protect ourselves, legitimate dyking is necessary. Yes, OED, necessary, indeed.
The thing about a list essay is that it’s not hierarchical. Note #1 isn’t more important or valuable than any other note; in fact, each note gains more meaning by entering the list’s relational field. Meaning gathers—hopefully (writing is an act of faith)—into another kind of perception. How might a meditation on a word, on language, help us observe more keenly, with more honesty and moral clarity. Legitimate holds hands with authority. What relationships help you cultivate your authority? What asks you to give (or leak it) away?
Two readings in Colorado
I’m currently in Colorado, promoting A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others. Come see me at UC Boulder on Thursday, October 23, at 6:30pm as part of the CW Reading Series in the Center for British and Irish Studies (CBIS).
Or, on Friday, October 24, I’ll be reading alongside Sarah Gerard and poupeh missaghi at Counterpath in Denver. That’s at 7pm.
Both events are free and open to the public.
What word would you like to consider?
Church: send me a note if you’d like to meditate on a word, or suggest a word for consideration.