Let Us Be Perfectly Clear

In response to Mark Lilla's "The End of Identity Liberalism,"
NYTimes, Nov 18th 2016

& the crop of similar, temperate pieces I see popping up these past few days

& the crop of similar, demonstrably less temperate dudes of my acquaintance who are saying truly smart things about the Democrats' neglect of the working poor, while -- in my opinion -- missing a huge opportunity (and being rather hypocritical) by employing an aggro, sneering tone in the direction of we butthurt "Others." (Alienating those who they claim to fight for)

(look, i am sanctimonious, too. but i'm trying to kick it.)

This is in the name of productivity*:

A true, new, intersectional liberalism
wouldn't diminish or dismiss your life
your "box's" life
your "interest group"
wouldn't, in other words, call your breathing an indulgence, a non-priority,
let alone "identity politics" or -- swallow gagging -- "politically correct"
the true, new intersectional liberalism wouldn't shelve You with words, for the sake of other words like "color-blind"
"sex-blind"
(GENERALLY blind)
because these words the temperate so prefer? are in fact just the same kind of useless in politics as the diminishers they hurl at us Others
they will not help you breathe, either set of words.

Too, we know if we read Zinn or newspapers, or if we look even halfway-hard at the world outside our windows, there's no blind way to be in America unless you've never known what it feels like to be the Only You in a room
(or, are actually blind)
which of course makes it telling, who prefers that shiny "blind" future rhetoric anyhow
(PSST: it's the blind!)
...But. I. Digress.
Inhale.....
Exhale.....
REALLY IN THE NAME OF BEING PRODUCTIVE, NOW!!!
:
The true, new intersectional liberalism of my goony dream heart and present/ future civic energy,
would see the hard fights not diminished, but doubled down on
tripled down on
and the neglected? those who have felt neglected, heretofore?
well, in goony dream heart they come to the table, too
because everybody's invited!
The liberalism gets wider and deeper. Not smaller. Not quieter. Louder.
If you're not here already, you will be asked to care about your fellow man. But don't panic! It won't hurt, and it won't actually make you smaller. We'll all talk slow. We'll listen good. You will not die. We all will grow.
I fear lately that we weren't loud enough before, about that 'fellow man' part?
and also, the invitation
(or I wasn't loud enough before, and am projecting
sigh, allllllll this life we will be shouting)
In any case. This is what I'm willing to cop to this evening: you can come and sit by me.

But what is she saying? She's saying:
to tell the boxes who make up the Party to "pick their battles,"
to make a light shine lesser so it might be more diffuse
that way lies forgetting history
and REALLY stalling progress
and contriving a world, once more, where lots of us feel unseen, I grant you,
but also like physically hunted
(I know we're some of us there already, in that world, but it's really the end if the true, new liberalism  wilts in the discussion of battle-picking, before the war even gets started. This is against that.)
Democracy is compromise, pragmatically speaking, but it is also not and never saying "This whole box of folks is of no concern to Us right now."
That's a different kind of governing, make no mistake.
So.
If you are the white woman, the poor white man, the rural human, the small business-owner, the X factor who is NOT David Duke incarnate:
I want to fight with you, I do. For your livelihoods and business. For your right to be happy and free. But that is only granted you'll fight with me, and us.
This is just how these things go.
In dream heart, not them vs. us. Not us vs. Us. We, here, smiling, together, walking out onto the water, afraid.
But let me perfectly clear: by the grace of your higher power, I will be goddamned if you won't come to meet me on this bridge. I will be goddamned if I walk backwards. Let's just you consider yourself beckoned. And I will greet you. I will call your names and show the way. I will fight with hands and listen with ears in the name of the dark that surrounds us all, but in intersectional country nobody's going an inch backward. People get drawn out or left on the shore.


Finally, to this intersectional point: I want my dream heart liberal president to be this
but if I must compromise, I will take one who makes the most conciliatory mention, names the names, calls human, does not actively hunt
our boxes, groups, we Others; I'll take a President who at least attempts to see
(because another thing the blind don't understand is: words are only words, sure, but they can be quite tonic. The specific, well-chosen best of them can actually make it easier to breathe.)
in my head, this is not too much to ask for. Not even, in fact, so much progress.
But if we're talking about forming a great big rainbow coalition in which it's conveniently forgotten how their parents died of diseases the country wouldn't cure
and their parents died on boats being dragged here
and their parents spent a lifetime trying to get in
and they're suicidal because the country calls their gender "not a priority"
and they're in prison because the country failed them from birth
and they're perpetually diminished by the way they look, talk, walk, breathe
and they died in labor, in labor, everyone in labor, look at all of us in labor all the god-damn time:
this is the way I will shout.

Great.
Now sign in blood, and then let's talk about climate change. What concrete thing have you done this week? :-) :-) :-) Call your senators and volunteer, gang! zozo Gossip Girl

*A pertinent note: to buy any of this, you'd need to make a reductive mental leap and pretend that we're in any kind of shape to be standing side by side in America, calling people 'brethren.' I understand not everyone's in a position to think this way. I know in my bones that this country was never and isn't presently a place where all enjoy equal protection under the law, but this goony manifesto is struggling to speak on and for the present climate -- the past, accordingly, is referred to in blanket statements. This is to say, to some extent the suspension of your belief in the inherent brokenness of things may be required to eat this/keep getting out of bed.

*if you put your truck in the electoral college. Which I have here in the name of productivity, but won't in the future.

Some thoughts at the end of the world

So I’m not trying to be Jesus-y.

I am livid, I am fearful, I am exhausted, I am frustrated. I am black, I’m an adult woman who relies on her IUD and ObamaCare-funded health insurance to get by in this world. The America I want to be a part of is relentlessly inclusive, and in it there is equal protection under the law for all minorities, and everyone is entitled to pursue happiness free from discrimination. Except insensate unborn fetuses; especially mentally ill black men on death row and trans teenagers. 

This said:

Much of what I perceive these past few days is rage-centric, and begins with a hate to match the hate the right brought on election day. And make no mistake, the ‘they vs. us’ rhetoric has been employed, conveniently and often for the left in these days -- I don’t exclude myself. Things you hear said/I have said: Those who voted for Trump are racists, categorically. They are idiots, categorically. They hate people, they hate themselves and their own interests. They voted for racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-climate change legislation, to be sure. The final thought is a write-off: “I’m done working with and for these people. Fuck the flyovers. I will unfriend, I will shut down, etc. Had I my drothers, the rust belt would fall into Mt. Dune.”

I find it very tempting to think this way but I have to inspect it, and here’s why: I’m pretty fucking mad at the left, too. I’m mad our voter turn-out was so abysmally low. I’m mad that I, myself, opted out of several opportunities to canvass for votes in Pennsylvania because I felt secure in the results of this election. I’m mad at those who claim to care about the environment and equal rights and decided to aproductively demonstrate this care by voting for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson (I’ll say in swing states, specifically -- this given the way we know our admittedly flawed two-party system works, has worked, will work until a viable third party candidate shows up. 2020? 3020?). I’m mad at the black people in Wisconsin and Michigan, and the Asian people in Wisconsin and Michigan who stayed home, and the people who stayed home everywhere, I’m mad at The New York Times and their evidently bonkers polling methods, I’m mad at that smug graphic that clogged the front page daily for weeks leading up to last night, which likely encouraged more than a few liberal-leaning to stay home and assume “everything will turn out right,” in lieu of voting. Look, see? This is not a shiny post for platitudes. I, hopefully like you, am Fury. But I am also a citizen, and determined to be. And if my rage revolves, I have to accommodate for what almost feels like a final taboo in my particular, somewhat insular New York circle. This taboo I’m about to talk about? (Some of you will check out right about now.) It demands I demonstrate some grace towards those who would hate me and my friends. Towards some who would see my way of life destroyed.

So we zoom back, to precariously engineer the point. A bit about me:

I am black and a woman and queer and an artist and poor, yet I grew up middle class. I grew up in liberal havens, before receiving my expensive private college education. As another person like me put it on Facebook, my encounters with racism have been constant and lifelong but microaggressive compared to, say, any black man, woman or boy dead by police hands in the past 229 years. Small potatoes, grim potatoes, perhaps, but I have to check my privilege when conversations conflating class and race continue to flutter around me, as they have in the past few years. Basically: I do not and cannot pretend to speak for all Black people when I talk about my experience, chiefly because I’m a Jack n’ Jill Negro. I do not know what it is to grow up wanting food, or being unsure of where I would sleep night to night. Granted the extensive sacrifices my grandparents, parents, and -- yes, she goes there -- enslaved ancestors made so I could live this life. Granted I will still never get as much respect or make as much money or have it as golden as any blonde-born upwardly mobile Wall-Streeter who swings his dick and black Amex around. And yet.

There’s a book going around lately by Nancy Isenberg, called White Trash.  (FD: I haven’t read it yet; there’s a long hold list on it at the library.) But the gist as I understand it is that the book tries to explain the historic link between poor whites and racism, isms of many kinds. You might know this already (depending on where you received your own bourgie education) but there’s an argument that a great deal of racism in America was foisted on the lower class, and quite deliberately. Racism was used as a dividing tool to prevent extant minorities from growing into something strong enough to topple existing power groups -- namely those white men of the Kennedyian last name, the Biltmores, the Rockefellers, their progeny. If you consider labor history in the rust belt, it began with leaders pitting blacks and whites against one another to keep labor costs down. This process also recurred with the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese and -- so we see now -- the Latinx community. Basically, it has always been in the interest of the ruling power to create fractions among the majority have-nots (and incidentally, the Left) so the minority haves might guard the keep.

So after being fed racism, fed the edict that whites have more in common with the people signing their checks than the people working next to them, it stands to a crooked kind of reason that you’d prioritize some glittery, vague idea of economic autonomy over your fellow man who doesn’t look like you -- even given two hundred years of reform language trickling slowly down your pipeline from channels in a distant East. This is to say, I believe there’s an extent to which the suddenly jobless miner in Pennsylvania who may not demonstrate or even feel overt hate in his heart was seduced into the ‘Make America Great Again’ rhetoric, and long long ago -- practically back at the dawn of this country’s industrial life, when this specific community was taught to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and then made to feel preposterous when they could not. Witnessed those groups they’d been taught to malign supposedly transcend (read: not at all transcend) invisible social barriers when measures to protect them (women, minorities) came to Congress, when the media appeared to congregate around their causes. The poor white man is thusly, perpetually defensive, because he was manipulated and then abandoned by the right -- and then chastised, and eventually loathed by my precious left for failing to come to bat for his fellow humans when they cried for liberty. This is not to excuse any open or insidious vitriol in the hearts, minds or ballots of Trump voters: I make no apologies or amends to anyone who’s slur-hurling or worse in their post-election throes. I want to reach instead those who may have voted for Obama and his likewise seductive hope and change in 2008, but saw both sides of the country continue to ignore them after his inauguration and thusly switches gears in 2016, mad as hell. I want to reach instead that well-enough meaning relative who fails to believe “he means it” when Trump talks about pussy-grabbing or mass deportation, and swivels the conversation instead back to the economy, and how the master deal-maker himself might rejuvenate it. I write instead to the disenfranchised poor whites of the rust belt, who -- she did condescend, from her liberal perch -- have historically not known any better, as was the rich white man's prerogative. I mean, did any Democrat bring the exciting renewable energy job creation program to Kentucky? Seriously tell me, I wanna know: did anyone on the left do that?

This is not to excuse it. This is merely my first and very painful, rather clumsy attempt to understand.

And I know this is 1) a reductive oversimplification and 2) a hard pill to swallow, even where (if) it rings true and useful. I would counter-argue to myself that the black body in America has undergone and continues to experience a vilification far surpassing other minorities in this country -- at least, so far. Yet I do not understand what it feels like to be poor. Face to face with a Klan-robe-clad, impoverished ex-miner in West Virginia, I’m not saying I’d turn that Jesus-y cheek -- but I am in the privileged position (New York City, baby) of saying I can imagine my way into the heads of certain out-of-job folk in the rust belt who do not necessarily feel they carry hate in their hearts but are seduced instead by the rhetoric of a made-over economy, in which there is a place for them. I saw a friend I respect say quite lucidly that the left had forgotten these people, too, when it ought to be their party as much as it ours. We are Other. This particular friend had incidentally been raising obnoxious hell for Bernie (and portending doom after his primary loss) for months. 

Perhaps this is all to say again, I am mad at everyone. But I am the most mad at, in order:

Donald Trump

The rich people who voted for Trump, with their every privilege and assumed education. The people who knew better.

The people who voted for Trump with unabashed hate in their hearts or on their tongues, in their actions.

David Duke, Fox news anchors, any thumping “Build the Wall” vulgarian spewing slurs, garbage monsters et al

the fact that our country is demonstrably not ready to believe a woman can lead

& finally:

my own shock

my party’s own shock

I would rather live in a world -- and perhaps before this week, naively believed I did live in a world -- that was beginning to move past dismissing human beings into foul terms like “identity politics” or “politically incorrect.” I want to live in a world, believed I did, where those who would see their fellow humans unable to access safe reproductive healthcare, unable to choose what to host in their bodies, unable to use fucking bathrooms, unable to seek haven from repressive regimes or poor living qualities -- I want to live in a world, believed I did, where those garbage people were diminishing and draining out like the last bits of sand in an hourglass, or more aptly, the last patch of sludge in a swamp. Those who would endorse rape culture and the killing of black men, the killing of anyone with handguns, can you tell my politics yet?, those who flatly deny science and our one collective job as stewards of this earth -- those people are almost gone, I told myself. The rest of us need only outlive them. We don’t even have to worry about the mythical ex-centrists of yore, those ancient Southern dems of myth, anybody caught in the crossfire  -- not if there is Evil Them, and Righteous Us, in my oh-so-partisan present day. So implied my own paper of record. 

But it isn’t so. And it wasn’t so, quite apparently. And no can or perhaps even should be in clear-eyed agreement at this moment about what to do next, but my instinct says that even in doubling down for the causes I believe in, in doubling down on my pledge to protect and fight for the life and life-rights of those perpetually disenfranchised humans I love and don't love, don't know, merely believe in --  I must do some work (internally and externally) in the next 2-4 years to seduce other people to our side. I think I believe we can make a few people understand that their interests are in fact ours, and their idea of a flourishing economy needn’t and shouldn’t ever come at the expense of our basic right to be alive. But I can’t do that if I hate them, you know? 

EDIT: Then again, perhaps this is all my own mental gymnastics, something I have to believe in to move forward. Perhaps it's denial. Perhaps this what a Pollyanna looks like in 2016. Maybe every Trumper  knew full well what their vote would mean for millions of their fellows, and did it anyway. Maybe they believe women and minorities don't deserve equal protection, and it's no biggie to have a President who speaks this way; maybe they hate us. Even so; I think I have to retain some wide-eyed sense of productivity, some vision of truly bi-partisan discourse. If only to get out of bed.

EDIT 2; a drastic pivot: Watching Paris is Burning and thinking some more. Perhaps grace is not the course. Can fury be productive? Can we blaze onward and harder, abandoning any concession to the broken bipartisan model? I don't actually think I can truck with anyone who actively worked to take away minority rights. This shit has been going on too long already. 

EDIT 3, cantering:  A wiser friend: "Empathy needs to work both ways, and poor white people who broke for Trump this year should be empathized with but they need to consider other people as well, just like POC ave constantly been asked to do."