The Day After
Written by Ashley Kelmore, Posted in Feminism, Politics
Tuesday morning, I woke up with some serious nerves. I bought donuts for the office, and ended up eating about three by the time I finally gave up at 3:30 to head home. Some friends and I had gone in on a rental house for the night – five couples plus four little ones, watching the returns and celebrating the election of the first woman president.
We had lots of food, lots of drinks, lots of games, and some incredibly thoughtful prizes put together by one friend, who was excited to let her young daughter stay up to see the results.
Things obviously took a turn. Once it looked less and less like things were going to go our way, I started to shut down. I paced, I puttered, I refreshed Twitter. I stress ate until my body turned numb and my appetite disappeared.
At around 9:45, I said I’d had enough and went to our room. But closing the door didn’t block out the sound of those damned Hunger Games horns on MSNBC. I played with my phone, I tossed, and I turned. At some point, the race was called for the Republican nominee. I told my husband I just needed to go, so I took the car and drove home, crawled into bed, and stared at my cats.
I was about to shut down for the night when I saw that Ijeoma Oluo was broadcasting live on Facebook. I’ve never been happier for social media than I was in that moment, because what she said made sense. I also cried for the first time that night, those hiccup-y sobs that don’t come all that often for me. She reminded all of us that the world didn’t change last night; we just got a diagnosis, a confirmation of what the country is. And that we had two months before the man would be inaugurated.
I attended a protest tonight for a bit before I had to run to an appointment. I didn’t fully agree with all the speakers – I don’t think I can call myself a full-fledged socialist, and I don’t see Hillary Clinton and the Republican Nominee as basically the same, or her as the lesser of two evils. I saw a woman with whom I disagreed on some issues, but who was more qualified than any other presidential candidate we’ve had. But that’s not a belief many of these protestors shared, and that’s fine, because we did still all agree that we need to do everything in our power to stop this man and his policies at every turn.
I’ve seen people talking about the good people who voted for the Republican nominee, [edit: as though people we see giving to their community, loving their neighbors and acting as we think good people generally act can’t also be racist]. When I see that, all I think about is the willful ignorance of people who don’t want to believe that their family members who voted for that man are racist, sexist, and homophobic. Because the thing is, they are. There isn’t a way around that. They are. They might not be a Klan member, but EVERY white person is racist. It’s a fact. We must work actively every day to not let our biases lead to discrimination, but we can’t grow up in this world and not be.
And the people who voted for that man may not think that they are racist or homophobic, but by putting their economic fears above the reality of the harm this man will do to people of color, gay people, immigrants, trans people, and women, they chose their own perceived benefit over the safety of those groups of people. That’s foul at best.
In the coming days, I want to harness this frustration, because I need to not lose the energy I have. We already set aside money to donate to charity; I want us to be much more strategic about what we do. We can spend more time supporting individuals and groups that will need it in the coming weeks.
No one deserves this man – or his vice president – to be the one making policies that will impact their lives. We need to aggressively fight this. And white people, we need to be the ones putting ourselves on the line the most, because (especially the straight, cis, male ones among us) we are the safest right now.
We will work to change things in this country, and right now I’m not sure how to do that. But in the meantime, we protect our friends, and strangers too, who are feeling scared. Immigrants. Muslims. Jews. Women. People of color. Trans people. Members of the LGBTQ community. All the people that this man has demonstrated he hates, we need to love, and protect. I may have nothing but disgust for this man, but (even with all I said above), I do still believe that love can win out, eventually.
He is not my president. Tomorrow, and every day after, we find a way to fight back.
[You might notice I haven’t said this man’s name in this post anywhere. I’ve promised myself that I won’t say his name, or type his name, or do anything that legitimizes his presidency. This is not some Hermione-disapproving Voldemort thing; I just don’t think he deserves even the respect of a mention by name.]
*I have edited one sentence since I posted this (it is clearly marked as such). I made this change after the first two comments below were published, as that first comment reminded me that I had poorly articulated at least one of my points.
I worry that when people say things like “EVERY white person is a racist” b/c of structural racism it ultimately narrows and steepens the path toward eliminating the structural racism itself. I think at least two independent forces drive that reaction.
The first is basically a bizarro-world tragedy of the commons: we tend to collectively treat things that are everyone’s problem as no one’s responsibility. I think we see examples of that in other social issues (human impact on the planet is the one that jumps to mind for me) and in less high-stakes settings (projects at work, cleaning-chores among housemates, etc).
The second is the more basic/obvious problem we’re all familiar with. People don’t like being called racist or thinking of themselves as racist, etc, etc. This argument usually gets dismissed on the basis that “it doesn’t matter if it hurts people’s feelings if it’s true” or similar reasoning. And I see the appeal of that. But I dislike it for the same reasons I dislike hearing conservatives insist on using terms like “illegal immigrants”–whatever technical truth can be found in the label doesn’t justify the pejorative slander of tagging an entire group of individual people as “illegal”. In the same way, I don’t think the inherent truth of structural racism justifies the pejorative effect.
Finally, I like that “racist” and “racism” are pejoratives. I like that the term conjures up images of the KKK, lynchings, police dogs and firehoses and that most white people now instinctively recoil from it and want nothing to do from it. And the reason I like that is because it is a historically recent development. Put another way, if we jumped in the Way Way Back Machine we wouldn’t have to turn the dial very far to the left to land in a time and place where white people would proudly and openly identify as racist in that most virulent sense. The reason “racist” stings now is because we have a societal norm that says “overtly oppresing people on the basis of race is bad and people who do it are bad.” I think we take that norm (and/or its permanency) for granted. And I think campaigns like the one we just witnessed should give us pause in that assumption.
So I guess my worry comes down to this, when we say things like “EVERY white person is racist” 1) the criticism will be reflexively rejected–because no one wants to think of themselves as bad/vile–and therefore won’t aid in changing structured inequality and 2) normalizing the word “racist” will remove a tiny speck of the pejorative from overt, virulent racism that we only very recently pushed to the fringes of society after literally hundreds of years at the soft nougaty center. I agree we need to talk about structural inequality and we need to convince people, particularly white people, that it exists and needs to be fixed. But I also think we have to be very, very strategic in how we talk about it and to internalize how recent a development the current status quo of “overt racism’s bad, mmkay?” is and how steep a price of bloodshed and broken bodies it was purchased at. I wish I had a solution to pair with this worry. I do not. But I figure the more of us who want structural change worry about things like this the quicker we’ll figure out a solution or figure out why the worry’s not worthwhile.
This is really an interesting point, and one I’ve struggled with over the years. I think my position on it is changing as I delve more into the research and history of this issue. Which ultimately means I’m probably even worse at articulating and understanding things for a while, as I have so many new ways of looking at things that I haven’t had practice working out how to explain them.
A few weeks ago I got to participate in a training put on by Robin DiAngelo, who is probably most famous in her talking about white fragility. (She wrote a paper on it, I strongly recommend every white person read it). She points out that everyone is racist. But actually argues that the part of my essay above that would be bad is not calling everyone racist, but that we’ve decided racism is the moral be all end all, which leads to defensiveness and an unwillingness of white people to accept that racism ISN’T just Klan rallies and the N word. The below is from an interview she gave Alternet on the topic:
“For white people, their identities rest on the idea of racism as about good or bad people, about moral or immoral singular acts, and if we’re good, moral people we can’t be racist – we don’t engage in those acts. This is one of the most effective adaptations of racism over time—that we can think of racism as only something that individuals either are or are not “doing.”
In large part, white fragility—the defensiveness, the fear of conflict—is rooted in this good/bad binary. If you call someone out, they think to themselves, “What you just said was that I am a bad person, and that is intolerable to me.” It’s a deep challenge to the core of our identity as good, moral people.”
So I’m still sorting through how to look at this issue, and I think generally I both agree and disagree with your statements. I think you are right (which I don’t think was your main point, but that I think ultimately comes through) in that there is danger in using Racist the way I am using it because of that good bad moral binary, but also, I’m not wrong. I am not, however, sufficiently diving into and really examining the racist actions of those voters and how to have a real conversation of them that helps them understand that this is partly their motivation. I’m still not sure how to do that, BECAUSE everyone seems to want to stick with racist action = inherently bad person (including me, as evidenced above).
What’s more challenging for me, though, is that parts of the approach I think you are advocating above is that it also sounds a lot like asking people to just be nice about it, don’t call people out in these ways because they just shut down and we won’t get changed. And I think a lot of evidence points to the reality that things don’t really change when folks are really nice about it. I don’t know if they do when people are cold jerks like I am being in part, but I think there is something incorrect in thinking if we are just a bit more careful about how we talk about this issue, more people will listen and come around.
But like I said at the top, I know my thoughts and the way I share them will likely change over the next few days and weeks and months) but I really appreciate your contribution to this conversation.