It's always strange
seeing one's country from the outside in, now more than ever. And
that goes double when the places you see flashing across the news are
places you once knew so intimately.
George Floyd was
murdered outside the shop I used to go to on the regular on 38th
and Chicago in Minneapolis, and when I saw the burning of Lake
Street, I saw the corners where a middle-aged man tried persistently
to scam me out of a few bucks, where I got yelled at for refusing to
give a girl coming out of the club a ride on the handlebars of my
bike on a stoned dawn ride home, where I happily ate tortas on
curbsides.
And what seem
awfully like violent,
right-wing attacks keep occurring at the corners in Seattle
where I once drank a bottle of wine in the bucket of a front-end
loader, where I spent afternoons reading on the grass, where I once
had a long kiss goodbye.
I know now is not
the time for dreamy musings, but I still have them, and other than
monetary payments to righteous groups – my sole attempt at praxis –
it's been my way of dealing with the insanity of America. Endlessly
musing on my patio in the monsoon rains far, far from the action. A
brief scroll through social media is filled with exhortations to do a
something, to educate oneself, and I don't know what to say – I've
done a fair bit of my due diligence, I've read Angela Davis and
Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver and bell hooks with admiration. I've tried to be a
good listener, as someone who grew up in a remarkably white-bread
town and didn't really understand the concept of privilege in my
heart, through and through, until I saw a Seattle bus driver let me
through on an expired transfer before examining the transfers of a
group of black teenagers like a gem dealer trying to spot a fake.
That being said, I don't participate in the conversation, really,
because my voice isn't worth much of a damn.
But despite my best
attempts to keep up my odd, perhaps irrational, optimism of the will,
my delight at the realization that I'm witness to the largest civil
rights movement in America in half a century, my pessimism of the
intellect keeps pushing through.
In addition to my
fear of reprisals, whether by white stochastic terrorists or by
sitting senators, I'm just as terrified that any kind of real change
will ultimately be elided in lieu of individual therapeutic guilt among the white professional classes and
pure symbolic gesture by the levers of capital.
My first worries
began with the Thai celebrities proclaiming that “black lives
matter” even as they gleefully cheer on the jackboots who run their
own country, and thereby making a statement that says more about
their attempt to identify with the first-world metropole than any
kind of real compassion or concern for workers or the poor. It wasn't
exactly helped by Senate Democrats who had enthusiastically signed
onto the Clinton crime bill donning kente cloth like they're in
Arrested Development (the '90s R&B group, not the Bluth Family),
or by Mitt motherfucking Romney joining a march in a sorry attempt to
redeem himself.
Furthermore, as more
and more people have signed on to the premise of, you know, actually
taking the experiences of black Americans into consideration, I keep
seeing more and more attempts by large corporations and the
capitalist state to attempt to exculpate themselves. It's the litany
of brands trying to woke-ify and blackwash themselves, despite their
rapacious greed, union-busting, and rent-seeking. It's the campaign
to rename Fort Benning in Georgia (named for proud defender of the
Peculiar Institution and generally worthless human Henry Lewis
Benning), and ignoring the fact that it hosts the Western Hemisphere
Institute, which has spent the past 70 years training nun-raping
Latin American strongmen as one of the single vilest apparatuses of
American empire.
These are simply new
manifestations of old fears. In the struggle for Irish independence,
James Connolly spoke of his trepidation that any kind of
revolutionary change would be co-opted, phrased with a Hibernian
charm and a Victorian flourish that I cannot hope to match:
“England would
still rule you to your ruin, even while your lips offered
hypocritical homage at the shrine of that Freedom whose cause you had
betrayed.”
Like
I said, I'm far away from the metaphorical England and the
metaphorical Freedom. And hope is not dead in me yet – if it was I
wouldn't be at my laptop right now, I'd have the windows blacked out
and a freezer bag full of Burmese heroin on my coffee table – but I
need to bear witness to a certain degree.
To
that end, I am heartened to large degree. I'm glad that people seem
to recognize that not-even-half measures don't cut it, I'm glad the
black-square Instagram thing got all the derision it deserved, I'm
glad a certain inflection point has been reached. Even as I'm
terrified that white moderates who fill Twitter with GIFs of clapping
black women are going to derail shit and become active hindrances the
moment more serious changes become the next pragmatic steps.
Keep
pushing on. Eyes on the prize, motherfuckers.
