social critique – MOIRARTS

Juneteenth 2020

Leading up to Juneteenth, I have been thinking a lot about time. Specifically, the way that racism steals time from Black people’s lives. In the crudest most extreme way, racism kills Black people, cutting off years of living. Even when people are not killed prematurely at the hands of the police state or through the disparate impacts of poverty, environmental pollution, and medical malpractice, Black people have minutes, hours, months, and years siphoned out of their lives.

Take Juneteenth. On top of the centuries of free living that enslavement stole from Black people, the specific white supremacists of Texas stole another 2.5 years. We celebrate Juneteenth as a recognition that before that day, there was no national “independence” in the United States. But it’s more complicated than that. As laid out here, in many parts of the country Black people were enslaved until the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified. Black people were prevented from moving freely, keeping them from leaving the locations of their enslavement and empowering white supremacists to continue to steal years of their lives. People were freed, but their time was still being taken by institutionalized racism.

I absolutely support Juneteenth and love that more people are learning its history. (I was today years old when I learned that August 1st, the generic bank holiday my Canadian family has appreciated as a day off my whole life, is a commemoration of the date enslavement ended in Britain and its remaining colonies.) I have encouraged its celebration in our family and community as an alternative to the gagging nationalism of the Fourth of July for a number of years now, as an exultation of Black freedom and a recognition of Black struggle. I agree with the premise of The 1619 Project, that the United States–and the creation of “white” and “Black” USians–is inseparable from enslavement and amassing of wealth extracted directly from Black lives. There is no other place like this in the world, no other country where we have created ourselves in this way. Yes, white Europeans violently colonized practically the entire world. Yes, Black and brown people have been, and continue to be, brutally oppressed in the aftermath of that colonization. Perhaps it is a truism that it is not done anywhere else the way it is done here, something that everyone everywhere can assert.

Still, though. There is something to the USian way that is insidious and endures. Even now, every day, racism is stealing Black people’s time. Poor and working people spend hours navigating bureaucratic black holes, with absolute disregard for their time. Working and middle class people spend hours in transit, residential segregation structuring landscapes where it is nearly impossible to live near where one is able to find a job. All Black people have their time siphoned off in small bits here and there through dealing with interpersonal aggression and the conciliation of well-meaning white people at work, in neighborhoods, in their children’s schools. How many hours of their life is any given Black person trapped waiting through white tears alone?

It is undeniable that the creation of white wealth in this country stems directly from Black lives. We should all give what we can to racial justice efforts, to bail funds and youth organizers; to legislative lobbying for racial justice in education, community safety, and work; to mutual aid projects like housing, clothing, and feeding community members. We should donate toward the safety of Black trans people, whose very lives and existence, Angela Davis reminds us, challenge our assumptions of “normalcy” and expand the range of what we imagine to be possible. We should pay and pay and pay, as individuals and as a country.

What we should also do is value Black people’s time. Consider the ways in which we demand it, the ways in which we waste it, and the ways in which we fail to consider it at all. We should educate ourselves, rather than siphoning that learning from Black people, but we should also know that while we use the luxury of our unconstrained time to read books, Black people are dying. We should absolutely reflect and acknowledge our racist wrongs, the times we have called a neighbor by the wrong name or chosen not to see how mistreatment by a racist medical system created conditions of illness or stress for those in our community. We should then refrain from sucking the time of our Black neighbors and colleagues in seeking absolution. We should push for streamlined and transparent bureaucratic processes, fully staffed government offices and public libraries, frequent and extensive public transportation, and direct aid whenever necessary. Because ALL Black lives matter, and we continue to steal lives when we steal time.

More than anything, we should be vigilant about how we can do better next time. Because there is always always always a next time.

Black Lives Matter protests

It’s the tenth straight day of ever-growing protests against police brutality across the United States and around the world. It’s our 86th day of coronavirus distancing. Everything feels simultaneously like too much and not enough.

As I’ve watched the street protests grow and grow and grow over the past ten days, I’ve been holding my breath. Waiting for the wave to break. Waiting for people to be intimidated back into their homes, for the numbers to dwindle down to a core of activists blocking highways, as has happened in the past. For the nice white liberals to change their profile pictures, post their beautifully graphically designed slogans, and go back to their lives. That’s how it’s gone every other time there’s been an outcry about a police murder of a Black person, a peak of interest and outrage and then a retreat, leaving me the lone voice of an angry sociologist ranting into the wind of the suburbs once more.

This time feels different. This time, coronavirus has already disproportionately decimated Black communities with job losses and deaths of family members. People have nowhere to go and nothing to do, nothing left to lose by being in the streets. At the same time, white people are home as workplaces and schools close, with nowhere to be and nothing to do to distract from the images of police violence and the voices of Black people. This time, it is harder to turn away, and we are all emotionally open in a way we have not collectively been in a long time.

What I see is not a dwindling, but a joining. I hear racist oppression and institutional violence named and described in the public discourse with a clarity and consistency that has not happened before in my lifetime. In the past I have heard endless cries of “why don’t they wait, why don’t they lobby”; this time, I’m hearing “of course people are angry, why shouldn’t they act.” I am not the only one in my neighborhood pushing back, I am not the only one arguing for action. Maybe these years since the murders of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, and thousands of others have mattered, maybe all of these various actions have made a difference. Maybe the accumulation of grief and anger in the spirits of white people has been happening in ways that haven’t been visible. Maybe, finally, we have reached a tipping point that will contribute to meaningful change in our systems.

I have a friend who works in international conflict resolution, and we sometimes argue about non-violence. I am not a pacifist, as much as I might aspire to be, and the arguments are usually about the social value of punching Nazis. My friend really is a pacifist at heart, and it grieves him to put more violence into the world, even if that violence might be necessary to push back fascism. When we talk about what it means to be non-violent in the face of racist state violence, I remember that the non-violence of Dr. King was always a strategy, a way of exposing white supremacist violence without being blamed for provoking it. When TV news broadcast footage of police officers beating and hosing protesters, of angry white mobs attacking Black students at sit-ins, the truth of those images was impossible to deny. There was no way to turn away, not without the shame of knowing that you were taking the side of the oppressor. White people acted because the violence of other white people was both undeniable and unconscionable, and they wanted to stand outside of it, not because they recognized in the non-violence of Black people something they had failed to see before.

This week, I have seen dozens of videos of cops attacking protesters and journalists. Opening fire with tear gas and rubber bullets, beating with batons, kicking and shoving people to the ground, ramming with bicycles and shields. People have been blinded, permanently and temporarily. At least one person has died after being sprayed full in the face, others have been shot to death. Whatever guidelines departments have in place, police have uniformly failed to follow them. None of these behaviors are isolated or unusual: when the cameras roll, the violence follows, in every city around the country once the daytime marchers with children go home, and sometimes before. As someone quipped on Twitter, “The amount of police brutality at the anti-police-brutality marches is proving a lot of points.”

This, then, is what the protesters are achieving: they are putting their bodies into the streets as the foil against which the intractability of police brutality will become undeniable. We are seeing these videos as they happen live on TV and the internet; they are being archived and rebroadcast, catalogued and used to challenge the city and county councils who have been so accommodating of this violence over the decades when the police have received more money than education, transportation, and health services. People are no longer willing to pay for this, no longer willing to believe that more violence makes us safer, no longer willing to accept the cops who stand by and do nothing as “good,” no longer willing to stand apart as those who are protected from the ones the police beat, no longer willing to have this done in our names or under the guise of keeping our children safe. We want all our children to be safe, we want our “we” to encompass those Black and brown people whom the police have treated as disposable for too long. We who cannot march need to keep pushing our officials, keep donating money to bail funds and to local organizations who have been doing this work for years.

We have allowed this by looking away. We are not looking away now.

Document

A few weeks ago, when I was getting extremely anxious about this virus but it seemed like nobody else was, I had the strong desire to hear “Exhuming McCarthy.” That song was one of my favorites as a young teenager, right at the point when I was growing into what what would become my permanent taste in music.

At that time, we all bought our cassettes from Von’s, the shop that occupied several connected store fronts and sold everything we needed as teenagers: books and magazines; records, cassettes, and later CDs; t-shirts, smutty cards, and gag gifts; and what can only be described as hippie shit: polished slices of geodes, statues of animals and wizards, decorated wooden boxes with hidden doors made in Poland, crystals and semiprecious stones, silver jewelry, that sort of thing. I didn’t have as much money to spend as most of the kids I knew, but once I was old enough to get a part-time job at school, I put almost all of it toward music.

I probably bought Document because of “It’s the End of the World…” or maybe just because that’s what we all were listening to. However, in the midst of the (first) Bush presidency and the start of the (first) Gulf War, it was “Exhuming McCarthy” that became my favorite song, with its scathing indictment of the hypocrisy of corporatist politicians. (It would be many more years of education and activism before I would grasp what it meant to be “addressing the Realpolitik.”) The more years I spend in DC, the more it rings through my head at times of government failures, never more so than when Democrats invariably choose not to use what power they have to fight for us.

This month, rather than turning to the internet, I dug out my old cassette and put it on while I worked. After all these years, Document is still an excellent album. It’s rare these days that I have the patience to listen to an album all the way through; I’ve been spoiled by decades of the ability to skip around on CDs and find online only the song I want to hear at that moment. That day, I just put the tape on and let it go. In doing so, I was reminded of why this was a favorite album, why bars of it come back to me at the oddest moments, why I listened to it over and over until I can still sing along to the whole thing thirty years later.

From the first distinctive notes of “Finest Worksong,” I was back in my high school bedroom, full of enough indignant energy to carry me as far as I needed to go. I have been so demoralized by the last ten years of governance in this country. This year may be the one when we truly see how far “it could always be worse” takes us, but I have learned not to assume we have hit rock bottom. Being confined to my house while the world drowns in its own lungs, though. This is taxing. It’s hard to maintain a determined revolutionary spirit in the midst of so much worry.

We’re all turning to the arts to sustain us, but it was necessary for me to remember the power of music to awaken and energize rather than only soothe and numb. To remind us of who we are.

Landed gentry rationalize. Look who bought the myth.

We are the followers of chaos out of control.

There’s something going on that’s not quite right.

Crazy, crazy world. Crazy, crazy times.

Singer, sing me a song.

Calling people hoarders is ableist

For all that people online talk a big talk about disability rights and support, I’m seeing a whole lot of bullshit policing and attacking what people are putting in their shopping carts. Cries of elitism, selfishness, and hoarding are everywhere. Assumptions abound that everyone is abled who is not visibly disabled, and therefore not meeting any real need with their purchases. And I have to say, it’s fucked up.

First off, the language itself is ableist. We’ve spent years pushing back against words like lame, spastic, crazy, moron, idiot, crippled, not to mention the r-word, and now we’re labeling everyone we see buying more food than we think they need “hoarders”? Even if they are, in fact, hoarding, hoarding is a serious mental illness. But it’s okay to label and insult people for it now?

Second off, we seem to have completely reverted to not understanding the existence and large prevalence of invisible disabilities. Many many (many!) disabilities affect what people can and can’t eat. Not all of us have the luxury of walking into the store and just grabbing whatever’s left on the shelf, now or in a few weeks when production and delivery of groceries has slowed and replacement of specialty items has declined. It is difficult enough to find food on the shelves in the best of times, so we already stock up when we can. It’s understandably anxiety-inducing to wonder how much longer we’ll be able to.

Once we reach outbreak status, as we are on the cusp of in DC and already see in Seattle and New York City, many of us will not be able to go out and shop nor will we necessarily trust other people to be able to do it for us. My child has a list of 17 food allergies to accommodate that only 2 people besides me and my partner ever reliably screen out of his food; I have more foods beyond that which I can no longer eat due to my tissue disease. While able-bodied people are shopping for 1 or 2 weeks and assuming they’ll be safe to go out and restock then, we are anticipating needing to live off what we are able to procure for 3 or 4 weeks at least, until the incidence of the virus subsides enough in our area to make it low risk to be in contact with other shoppers.

Lastly, the obsession over how much toilet paper people are buying is really yanking my chain. Guess what? People shit! Lots of people shit at work and lots of kids shit at school, but for the next few weeks every single one of those shits is going to take place in homes. People with disabilities that affect their digestive systems shit particularly frequently. So yeah, we don’t want to be wiping our asses with our high school copies of Romeo and Juliet, if that’s all right with you. Medications that make us have to pee a lot are also incredibly common, so women in this situation need more toilet paper too.

Of course there are people being assholes in all of this. Profiteering off of a supply problem is an awful way to behave whether you’re a corporation or an individual or a government. All of those people should rot in hell. But the assumption that everyone you see at the store stocking up is in that category is corrosive to our ability to work together as a community right now. The empty shelves are a problem related to the profit model of grocery supply chains, because all the thousands of people who rely on this store were told to buy 2 weeks worth of all their food and toileting needs at the same time and the restocking assumptions are not designed to accommodate that. Stores now get daily instead of weekly deliveries and have very little food on hand “in the back” to replenish what sells out.

There are disparities we absolutely should be questioning. Are there necessities that, in the absence of increased supply, should probably be rationed based on the numbers of people in your household? (But do we really want to force people to tell the clerks about their IBD and increased need for toilet paper?) How are we going to help people who can’t afford to buy two weeks of groceries at one time, even if those groceries were in stock? How are we going to help people with food vulnerabilities get what they need to replenish their supply in two weeks? What can we do to pressure local and state governments to influence the grocery supply chain?

As so many people have already noted, this pandemic is revealing all the vulnerabilities in our social systems. Nobody should be entirely dependent on charitable donations to food banks at a time when supply is strained and people’s ability to continue to donate is uncertain. We will not come out of this unchanged, as individuals or communities. Many many people are going to sicken and die, and those who cannot self-quarantine for financial reasons are going to be disproportionately affected. We need to do everything we can to push for protections and supports for our most vulnerable community members; we are all in this together.

We Shall Overcome

Every year my child’s Quaker school celebrates Martin Luther King Day with a peaceful march through the surrounding neighborhood. The kids make signs, talk about Dr. King in big meeting, and share poems, songs, and skits about his life and work. The march concludes with the whole school standing together and singing “We Shall Overcome.”

This march is one of my favorite parts of the school year. I’m not the only parent who makes time to come and walk with our kids, reading signs and singing together as we march. I was surprised to learn a few years ago (but really should not have been) that most white people my age have not seen Eyes On The Prize, did not study the Civil Rights Movement in high school or college, and therefore do not know so many of the Movement songs that I associate with marching, protest, and MLK Day. I love looking around the circle to see so many caring faces, from the littlest kindergarteners to the oldest teachers, and hearing such a variety of voices lifted together in celebration, defiance, and hope.

This year, I was struck very particularly by “we are not afraid.” I realized, as I sang that assertion, that I am afraid almost all of almost every day, to some degree or another. I am afraid of acting and not acting. Afraid of the consequences of my choices and the impacts of things outside of my control. Afraid for myself, for my family, for my neighbors, for the country and the world. Afraid that the past that dogs my heels will never stop impacting my present, driving my future.

What does it mean to stand in the face of illness, disability, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, violence, imprisonment, and fascism and say, “We are not afraid today.” How can we reasonably be anything other than afraid?

It is a well-worn cliché that bravery is not the absence of fear, but action in the face of it. Our children are barely old enough to touch the edge of what they will have to bear in this world, and still it is so much for so many of them. All we can do is keep going, one step after another, while raising our voices together, choosing not to be controlled by fear.

Living In The USA

This morning I ended up waiting at the lab with an older man, both of us queued up for blood draws from the phlebotomist who’s excellent at taking only one try to get the vein. My neighbor in waiting was clearly a lab regular too and as we sat there we got to talking, as my gran would say.

He’d joined Kaiser the year I was born and it had seen his family through major surgery, a premature baby, and the sudden arrival of his own chronic illness nearly 30 years ago. Still only tentatively mobile after my descent into acute illness two years ago, I wholeheartedly agreed that without Kaiser I’d be dead too. Maybe not today, but much more seriously ill and in serious decline. My doctor was the first to really take seriously all the disparate symptoms and weirdnesses I’d been dealing with for 30 years. Without her persistence and diagnosis, I’d be struggling to get appropriate treatment for the myriad secondary troubles that my underlying condition cause.

“I just don’t know what people do without health care, it’s terrible,” he said with a deep shake of his head. “They’re always telling us this country is so great.” “It’s unconscionable,” I replied. They die, was what lay unspoken between us, both seeing too easily how we could have been on that road. Even now, with access to health care, the costs of actually using the care I need to remain functional prevent my family from participating in social life in so many other ways. We delay home repairs, to the detriment of local businesses and laborers we employ. We don’t take vacations, eat out, or go to the movies or local shows. Our lives are constrained. But every single day, as I take my pills, see my caregivers, and prepare the specialized diet I need to maintain, I am grieved by the knowledge that others with my condition don’t have even these options. While I am fortunate to have the household income to keep going, they are suffering, struggling to survive, and dying.

We moved on to trading war stories, literal stories of wars neither of us were in: my grandfather playing soccer on a stop in Kenya during World War II, his own story of avoiding Vietnam by having terrible vision. (“We are not going to give you a gun!”) The phlebotomist wondered if we had just come there to hang out, and my neighbor quipped that all we were missing were the drinks.

There are so many ways in which people are dying in this country every day. War, hunger, lack of housing, lack of medical care, police brutality, pick your poison. All of it so unnecessary.