RitaMcGrath
Wasn’t it amazing that Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” was able to put a feminist spin on aggressive pink? Well here we are in the summer of 2024 and slime green has taken its place. Brat summer is here and it seems to have taken over the meme-osphere.
Rita McGrath | Thought Sparks
So there I was on July 19, getting ready for a beachweek raid at Costco with our son and his wife, then heading to Boston to speak for the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy on the 21. That talk was on the morning of the 21 and I spent much of the rest of the day battling the logistics of Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor (summer weather has not been kind) and making it out to Long Beach Island.
Somehow, in the midst of all this, the world changed - Joe Biden ended his campaign, Kamala Harris picked up a lot of support and suddenly everybody was talking about “Brat Summer.” By the time our week at the beach was over last Sunday, slime green had taken over the style section of the New York Times, the Today Show declared lime green to be the color of the season and an English singer-songwriter named Charli XCX was taking the world by storm.
It turns out I wasn’t alone in not knowing quite what was going on. On July 22, none other than Rachel Maddow was trying to unpack the explosion of memes around Kamala Harris’ potential presidential candidacy. For instance, what’s the significance of the “you didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree” comment? That was Harris invoking her mother’s advice to understand the context and where you came from before attempting to create change.
What I love about the brat theme is the idea of turning what others might define as deficiencies into positives. As Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota pointed out, the Harris meme machine actually started with politicians, mostly Republicans, going after Harris. “They go after her laugh, they go after the coconut tree line, and the like, and what I love about this is that as a woman candidate, and as we saw in the Presidential race, women candidates are held to these standards that are nearly impossible to make. I love that they are just owning it and making fun of it, and kind of becoming an icon because of it.”
July 28 happened to be my birthday, and without intentionally doing so, I put on my only lime-green t-shirt for a day of stuff (our daughter is getting married this weekend and the run-up of activities is quite impressive).
With the arrival of the aforementioned New York Times section on how inescapable lime green was going to be, I thought, “what a coincidence.” I guess I’ve been doing the brat thing for a while, but what a wonderful idea to free younger women up from the restrictions of being told what they should wear, think, do and try.
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