If you go away, and you want it to mean anything more than going away, you have to come back. I am an old, semi-decrepit student and the year is beginning and I can’t stay long now. But I needed to come back and say these things, even if this diary doesn’t get a single rec, even from my friends. I will not have any time to post this week – in an hour the browser must close until Saturday morning sometime – so I’m tossing this in a few hours early. If that means I suck, sobeit. I’d rather be a little wrong than blow off the whole point of being quiet for a week and coming back.
It is clear to me that Armando, Denise, and others are stepping up to address the issues of racism in an incredibly thoughtful way. I would recommend to anyone who stepped out that they pick up Denise’s great Sunday FP diary and join Armando’s group, or hang and watch. I think it is the best of us, and the best of the site, that this work is happening. By “best” I don’t mean “most conciliatory” or “what I agree with” – what I mean by “best” is the sober assessment of where we are and careful speech to find understanding. To my reading, it is the spirit that turns pie fights into illuminating conversations. It’s why we come ‘round here anyway, and if administrative focus on these issues is what has come out of this week, then it is a win – for all of us.
It is clear to me that Obama’s presidency has been flat up against racist attitudes. Many, many people – primarily in the real world – people I’ve thought of as fairly liberal in the main, if not terribly political –have problems with a black man as their president. For the right, this is simply the air they breathe. If the endless procedural slighting of the president by people like Boehner doesn’t reek of “boy get off the sidewalk”, if that wink and sneer isn’t clear as day, then you aren’t paying attention. Our entire political party (the one we vote for, even if it isn’t the one we would prefer to support) is being peed on by people who think that slighting the president on absolutely everything will get them votes in the heartland, Worse, they seem to be right. While we’re fighting amongst ourselves, a national narrative about race is playing on the big screen, and it is ugly and profound. We argue that the right wants the economy to tank, and to build cynicism. I don’t think that’s the whole picture, or even most of it. The right is saying to their supporters and themselves that they will never accept the legitimacy of a black man as president. We’re not even talking about that, acknowledging it, while the right wing gets it with their Wheaties in the morning.
I truly believe that we are shaped most profoundly by what we choose to look away from. Growing up in America means getting really good at looking away from racism and racism based policies on poverty and criminal prosecution. The stuff going on is so bad that I can’t talk about American ideals and American policy in the same space without wanting to, quite literally, retch. Like me, a white trans woman, black and brown people in America are not considered human beings or treated as human beings, and if you start the conversation on some more elevated bit of policy, you run the deep risk of telling a lie. We are surrounded by lies, the things people have learned to make it easier or tolerable to look away, and when you build that argument, that case – examine your bricks, some of them have the dead and forgotten baked right in.
What happens to a society when it accepts great injustice and cruelty as normal? It means that anyone who carves out a little normal for themselves and their children is doing so on a scaffold of human misery – one they cannot easily change or address.
Most people in America today who have gotten to “OK” – whatever their race – have gotten there, in part, by letting the worst injustices go. Because you can’t fight everything and at the end of the day you want to protect your family and those you love. But you can’t get from there to a fair and just discussion by pretending that shit is OK. We have, as a country, simply destroyed an entire generation of black men. To do that, we have enlisted and coopted the system of criminal justice. How can you have a civil conversation about that with people who grew up without looking at it, learning to look away? Anyone who wants society to work wants their courts and police – however distrusted – to represent the ideals of a peaceful and just place. The defender of the status quo is speaking to political realities, to their own idealism. The victim of the system, or the person who loves someone who has fallen to that system, is speaking past a lump in their throat.
At some point the lies of a society become so large and terrible that small adjustments are noise and fluff in the shadow of profound cruelty and evil. I don’t know if calls for civility, or a desire to work across divides, will help with that much. All us liberal folk have a little bit of a voice, and we’ve been cultivating it and refining it, we can speak to true and awful things with care. But the people living this shit, for generations sometimes? They aren’t going to be able to sing without misery taking up the tune behind them, thin and high. If you can’t hear it singing too, then you are not listening at all.