Lost Coherence

“Here, in this place, we are flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs, dances barefoot in the grass. Love your flesh. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love our flesh.”

I was never going to write anything on this election. Mostly because what needs to be said has been said already by more attuned black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian-American intellectuals, journalists, and writers. But it appears I have to say something. And like often, what I have to say is more of repudiation of an underlying subtle interpretation, a small corruption that leads to a larger corruption if you will, than anything new.

So, finger-pointing, I really have no problems with this, as long as the finger is pointed in the right direction. The finger should not be point at the working class, or people of color, or 3rd party Presidential candidates. It’s somebody’s fault. A political party, one of only two in fact, loses the White House and the Senate and it’s no one’s fault? Oh, okay.

Let me start by reminding people that this is entirely normal. There is nothing more American than white supremacy. Modern movements of marginalized communities, such as Black Lives Matter and NoDAPL, are inheritors of over four hundred years of black and indigenous resistance. The brashness and vulgarity of Donald Trump tarnished the veneer off the system and that is why more people noticed the rotting corpse in the closet. But this is nothing new, the system has already been normalized.   

Many on the Left have recognized this election wasn’t about economic anxiety and it wasn’t about sexism, it was about race. I say this not because economic issues and sexism didn’t play a part for some people but these were not its supreme unifier. Sex and economic class is not what Trump supporters, overall, share with each other.

I believe the Democratic Party, being the Democratic Party, will learn little or nothing from this loss. Or rather they will learn the wrong lessons, or maybe the right ones if we’re talking about winning elections, but the wrong one if we’re talking about bettering the lives of people of color, immigrants, the poor and the working class. Likely the lesson Democrats will learn is to be more business friendly, more focused on white people, essentially more like the Republican Party whose tail they’ve been chasing since Ronald Reagan. The basic lesson everyone should learn is that a system that can legitimately return Donald Trump as its elected Imperialist in Chief is not a democracy. Unless by “democracy” we mean “rule of rich, screw the blacks, Latinx, Native Americans, Asian-Americans, Muslims, and while we’re at it let’s not try to solve hunger, homelessness, health inequality, or economic inequalities because we love capitalism more than justice and equality”.     

Opponents will argue that fascists, homophobes, and racists can change and I agree. But that’s their journey. My journey is to survive. My journey is, to paraphrase Toni Morrison, to get free so I can free someone else. And it’s hard to do that when you have to argue with some random person everyday over your humanity and your right to life. From my perspective if calling a racist a racist shuts them down then so be it, they weren’t ready to not be racists. 

Now there is a role for political education of both fascists and non-fascists but that is not everyone’s role. In order to teach students have to, at some small level, be willing to learn. Before they can be taught a new way fascists and non-fascists have to question themselves. Self-doubt opens windows, windows become doors. Eventually they can walk through and someone will probably be helping them. But that someone will not likely be me. If that is you, I applaud you. You are doing essential work. We all have a role to play. There is no need for us all to do the same work. This is the duty of the white Left in the West.

Changing minds is a beautiful thing but it is a slow process and we have to live in this world. I think of Dr. King in his Letter from Birmingham Jail in which he states “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This ‘wait’ has almost always meant “never’.” It would be nice if people of color could live before time conquers our bodies. Too many people have been waiting for far too long. I suspect the “change minds” argument is also from a worldview that perceives the arch of the moral universe to bend toward justice. This relies in a theory of history as a linear progression, that things will always get better, which I think is naive.

What should the Left do? Organize as antifascist, yes, of course but organizing against fascism will not defeat fascism’s pillar: white supremacy. The thing the Western (white) Left needs to recognize is that it is, by the simple nature of being largely white and in the West, white supremacist. As philosopher Charles Mills states “white supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today”. White supremacy is a global system, it permeates the global political system, it is the global political system. And anyone who knows anything, or at the very least follows me on Twitter knows everything is politics, even neutrality. There is no exceptions, whether you are white, black, Asian, Latinx, or Indigenous, you are living under white supremacy, it’s a global political system. And whether you are white, black, Asian, Latinx, or Indigenous you are, by the political education of the system of white supremacy, racist. The Left, especially the white Left, must accept and then confront its white supremacists tendencies. There is, as former Conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would say, no alternatives. This is not a negotiation. Communism, socialism, social democracy, libertarian socialism, whatever your post-liberal capitalists dreams are, they are all impossible without the white Left recognizing the monsters that were born and are living under their bed. A movement that does not recognize this is not a movement worth supporting because in the end we will end up not far from where we’ve started.

The history of the labor movement in the U.S. is filled with patterns of black-white solidarity, only for the white majority to betray the black minority. As Bob Dylan sang on the message from politicians dividing the people “you got more than the blacks, don’t complain. You’re better than them, you been born with white skin”. But let no one convince you that the white people in general, including the white working class, do not benefit from white supremacy. Some in the labor and socialists movement will try to diminish the role of racism in the U.S. and say that it’s fundamentally about class. But in U.S. there is no difference between class and race. The process to which one becomes a race, in which one is racialized, is all about denying a group social and economic access. And once racialized, they become a permanent underclass.

Black people, Asian people, Latinx people, and Indigenous people will continue to fight racism and global white supremacy as they always have. But it is not their responsibility to save the Western Left. Nor do I believe they can save it from the cancer not of their making. As Charles Mills says white people “take their racial privilege so much for granted that they do not even see it as political”. As we can see now the people who voted for a white supremacist, are largely white from across many classes and sexes, and still argue the election was not about identity politics. In fact, they argue the Left’s insistence on identity politics is why white people voted for Donald Trump, because whiteness is not an identity.

Everyone is shitting their pants and complaining of how “divisive” the election was, like politics isn’t suppose to be divisive. Can’t we just get along and be a racists nation together? It’s divisive because these things matter. Politics is life and death. How many people has the strike of a pen killed? The Pope recently condemns the “epidemic of animosity” with Trump’s election, like the Catholic Church hasn’t killed a few with its support and participation in racism, sexism, homophobia, imperialism, colonialism, and adulation of capitalism. Where have you been Francis? Others complain the country is so “divided” and needs to “heal”. Yes, it needs to stop being racists, that’s the best medicine. I need to keep reminding you this because “come together” is a political speak” for “calm down, there are no skeletons in the closet. Blacks and Natives love us, it’s their fault they’re disenfranchised. We love the gays. Etc etc”.

The question some on the Left need to ask and are asking is “where do we go from here?”. Some are arguing for the election of a more left-liberal Chairperson to run the Democratic National Committee. Someone like Keith Ellison, member of the U.S. House representing Minnesota’s 5th congressional district. However, the solution can not be found in “history’s 2nd most enthusiastic capitalist party”. It will end in tears and disappointments, it always does.

She was “beautiful as the flame of her thought,” to her daughter Ina. Her husband the poet, intellectual, and mayor of Fort-de-France Aimé Césaire wrote of her: “Ingenuous flames you who lick a rare heart.” André Breton, interned in Martinique on the way to New York, described her femine beauty “which has never appeared to me more dazzling than in a face of white ash and ambers.” Suzanne Césaire burned. And she could write: “Martinican poetry will be cannibal or it will not be.”

Breton’s introduction to her came about by way of a chance, wartime encounter. Having left Marseille with Jacqueline and their daughter Aube, in late March, 1941 on a filthy and overcrowded ship, they arrived in Martinique only to be held in a camp by the Vichy authorities. On a day when he was allowed into Fort-de-France, he records:

“This town itself held onto nothing; it seemed deprived of its essential organs. Trade, all conducted in shop windows, took on a disturbing, hypothetical character. Movement was a little slower than necessary, the noise too clear, as though coming through the stranded wrecks. In the pure air the continuous ringing of a distant alarm bell.

"It was in these circumstances that I chanced, while buying a ribbon for my daughter, to thumb through a publication lying in the haberdashery. Unpretentious in appearance, it was the first issue of a review entitled Tropiques which had just appeared in Fort-de-France.”

Surrealism was already there to greet him. The following day Breton met Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, and Suzanne noted her impressions of him in a piece which appeared in the third issue of Tropiques. She writes of the “freedom to do and undo” and took from him the demand for freedom. Two years later she wrote that “far from contradicting, diminishing, or diverting our revolutionary feeling for life, surrealism shored it up. It nourished in us an impatient strength, endlessly sustaining this massive army of negations.”

Among the essays she wrote, “The Great Camouflage” stands out with its historic vision of Martinique—sweeping change is signaled from the start in a cyclone hurtling across the Antilles. She writes of the arrival of new authorities:

“On the beach there were some ‘metropolitan functionaries.’ They were landed there, without conviction, ready to take off at the first signal. The new arrivals are hardly adapting to our 'old French territories.’ When they lean over the malefic mirror of the Caribbean, they see therein the delirious reflection of themselves. They dare not recognize themselves in this ambiguous being, the Antillean. They know that the métis have a part of their blood, that they are, like them, of Western civilization. Of course, it is understood that the 'metropolitans’ are unaware of the prejudice of color. But colored descendants fill them with fear, in spite of the smile exchanged. They were not expecting this strange bourgeoning of their blood. Perhaps they would like not to respond to the Antillean heir who shouts, but does not shout out "my father.” However one will have to deal with these unanticipated boys, these charming girls. One must govern these unruly people.“

Misrecognition and miscegenation are elementary to the great camouflage. And Césaire claimed her right to a position in French culture as the cannibal these metropolitan functionaries wouldn’t admit they saw—she certainly possessed a consuming intellect.

In any case, despite the camouflage, the Vichy powers made publishing Tropiques a hazardous enterprise, banning it for a period before their withdrawal in 1943. And under the corrupt powers ruling the island, all of the editors faced the threat of imprisonment if not worse. After the war, she taught while Aimé Césaire won an the election for mayor of Fort-de-France on the communist ticket and was also elected deputy to the French National Assembly. He used this position to improve the status former colonies, transforming them into departments equivalent to those in mainland France. Suzanne went on to publish her play Aurore de la liberté and returned to France in 1955 to teach literature.

Sources

The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941-1945) / Suzanne Césaire, edited by Daniel Maximin, translated by Keith L. Walker (Wesleyan University Press, 2012) "On the beach…” quoted from p. 43.

“A Great Black Poet: Aimé Césaire” in What is Surrealism? Selected Writings by André Breton, edited by Franklin Rosemont (Monad Press, 1978) “This town itself…” quoted from p. 230.

Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, edited by Franklin Rosemont and Robin D. G. Kelley (University of Texas Press, 2009)

Martinique Charmeuse de Serpents by André Breton and André Masson, Ouevres Complètes, vol III (Éditions Gallimard, 1999). This title has been translated into English by David W. Seamon as Martinique Snake Charmer (University of Texas, 2008)

The world is outraged and I’m just numb.

I feel no more upset or sadden than I did a month ago. The news of cops killing another black person is no longer news, it just is.

There is a sense of pity that I feel from other non-black people, like I’m a character on a reality show as if my venting and pain is a production for others to consume.

Black resistance has become twitter hashtags that now everyone feels comfortable to use. Yes, say black lives matter three times fast and purify yourself of all your internalized anti-blackness and white supremacy!

Temporary awareness means people have finally had enough! Yes, lets take action, yes lets march in the streets, then people get arrested, organization co-opts, and energy is filtered into respectable politics. The movement fizzles until the next Cops Gone Wild video is released and we start all over again.

–I wonder how many fraternities stream the police murders and laugh, how many people watch it with enjoyment, ooh look they just released the uncut version, hell ya put that shit on the wide screen!

Every media outlet cover page reads Black Lives Matter. Media institutions that usually ignore our voices love moments like these. So much click bait. Let this be the moment you let your ONE token black staff writer shine.

So much profit in black death, we are not seen as human. Black people stay exploited, during grief, during pain, and in death.

Our suffering is entertainment, our coping is your entertainment, our resistance is YOUR entertainment.

And like a sitcom that has been on for too long there is predictability in both our action and inaction. Movement politics are as corrupt and opportunistic as state politics. The longer you stay involved the more cynical of people and their intentions you become. This is often written off as being jaded, but I think cynicism is an undervalued trait.

I guess I’m just over it all. What does it do, what has it done? As much as I think action is needed I know that it will lead to nothing. I know it’s not something I’m supposed to talk about or even say out loud. But, I do not owe anyone optimism. I fluctuate from nihilism and moments of hope.