'He's My Man!': Lyrics of Innocence and Betrayal in the People v. Billie Holiday
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the 1949 arrest, trial, and acquittal of prominent jazz singer, Billie Holiday, for possession of narcotics. It argues that Holiday's well-publicized encounters with the United States legal system and with abusive men in the years leading up to this trial worked to blur the distinction between her private anguish and the pain she sang about in her songs. These real life problems gave her public image heightened authenticity and her public performances the appearance of truthfulness and honesty. This image, in turn, added credibility to her testimony in the courtroom and enabled the jury to overlook the evidence (or lack thereof) in front of them. In the end, her "unlucky in life" public personal, an image configured from the same myths and stereotypes that typically operate to silence and trivialize black women's pain, instead facilitated the articulation of Holiday's narrative of innocence and betrayal in the courtroom and the acceptance of this narrative as truth by the members of the (white) jury.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".