Hi, hello. I’ve been away for some time. Thank you for being patient with me, and thank you especially to the paid subscribers who stayed — your support sustains me. I have now emerged from my depression cave, bleary eyed and disheveled, to write to you about contradiction. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the past few weeks, you see. Witnessing the contradictions in others, grappling with the contradiction within myself.
How to begin?
OK, this: Last Sunday, when Joe Biden announced that he was finally dropping out of the presidential race (after declaring only weeks prior that only the “Lord Almighty” could convince him to quit), I became witness to a fascinating and sobering phenomenon. I didn’t realize so many people have selfies/official portraits with Kamala Harris, waiting patiently in their camera rolls for this very moment.
That day, I had just taught the last session of my pop culture/personal essay workshop, riding on the high of being in community with other Black femme writers, when I collided into the wall of a seemingly never-ending string of images. Images of Black women, mostly Gen X and older, smiling with VP Harris, gleefully celebrating the possibility of a Black woman president.
At least twenty if not more people I follow on social media breathlessly rushed to post these pictures and declare their fealty to Harris, accompanying the photos with fawning, sentimental, 2008-coded captions about how, finally, there was hope for this country after all. “Black women will save us,” they said. “I’m with her,” they said. “Vote for Harris if you want to protect reproductive rights and you’re against racism!” they said. Many of these people have, in the past seven months, expressed solidarity (at varying levels of investment) with the Palestinian people. The Palestinian people who are currently facing total annihilation in Gaza, in a genocide funded by the Biden-Harris administration.
(Yesterday, I saw the image of a young Palestinian child’s head laying next to their body. It is not the first time I have seen a decapitated child in the past several months. I fear, and know, that it will not be the last.)
In the past week, I’ve seen people I know IRL solemnly thank Joe Biden for being an “honorable” man. I’ve seen tens of thousands of Black and white women “answer the call” to speedily mobilize on Zoom meetings, to raise millions of dollars for Harris. I’ve seen LGBTQ activists passionately declare that when they look at Harris they see themselves and that’s why they are voting for her. The contradiction here is not subtle. The past week has made me feel insane. I’ve felt like Mugatu in Zoolander screaming: “Doesn’t anyone notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!” I’ve been so deeply confused.
I posted this on my IG story shortly after I started spiraling over how many people I know are, after everything we’ve witnessed over the last decade in American politics alone, buying into the idea that a charismatic Black leader will save us from fascism:
Hi, hello. I’ve been away for some time. Thank you for being patient with me, and thank you especially to the paid subscribers who stayed — your support sustains me. I have now emerged from my depression cave, bleary eyed and disheveled, to write to you about contradiction. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the past few weeks, you see. Witnessing the contradictions in others, grappling with the contradiction within myself.
How to begin?
OK, this: Last Sunday, when Joe Biden announced that he was finally dropping out of the presidential race (after declaring only weeks prior that only the “Lord Almighty” could convince him to quit), I became witness to a fascinating and sobering phenomenon. I didn’t realize so many people have selfies/official portraits with Kamala Harris, waiting patiently in their camera rolls for this very moment.
That day, I had just taught the last session of my pop culture/personal essay workshop, riding on the high of being in community with other Black femme writers, when I collided into the wall of a seemingly never-ending string of images. Images of Black women, mostly Gen X and older, smiling with VP Harris, gleefully celebrating the possibility of a Black woman president.
At least twenty if not more people I follow on social media breathlessly rushed to post these pictures and declare their fealty to Harris, accompanying the photos with fawning, sentimental, 2008-coded captions about how, finally, there was hope for this country after all. “Black women will save us,” they said. “I’m with her,” they said. “Vote for Harris if you want to protect reproductive rights and you’re against racism!” they said. Many of these people have, in the past seven months, expressed solidarity (at varying levels of investment) with the Palestinian people. The Palestinian people who are currently facing total annihilation in Gaza, in a genocide funded by the Biden-Harris administration.
(Yesterday, I saw the image of a young Palestinian child’s head laying next to their body. It is not the first time I have seen a decapitated child in the past several months. I fear, and know, that it will not be the last.)
In the past week, I’ve seen people I know IRL solemnly thank Joe Biden for being an “honorable” man. I’ve seen tens of thousands of Black and white women “answer the call” to speedily mobilize on Zoom meetings, to raise millions of dollars for Harris. I’ve seen LGBTQ activists passionately declare that when they look at Harris they see themselves and that’s why they are voting for her. The contradiction here is not subtle. The past week has made me feel insane. I’ve felt like Mugatu in Zoolander screaming: “Doesn’t anyone notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!” I’ve been so deeply confused.
I posted this on my IG story shortly after I started spiraling over how many people I know are, after everything we’ve witnessed over the last decade in American politics alone, buying into the idea that a charismatic Black leader will save us from fascism:
“I have been listening to ‘Earth is Ghetto’ on repeat. I don’t get what’s going on here. Some of you don’t hate genocide enough for me. I don’t understand the world at all. I don’t get this. It’s not for me to get, I suppose. But I am barely surviving. I am wondering what even is the point of survival in a world where so many find genocide tolerable enough that they are able to describe the president whose government has simultaneously funded + denied the genocide as “honorable.” For doing something he was forced to do. What does survival mean in a world where so many will enthusiastically mobilize for a candidate who, save for the half-baked assertion that the the settler colonial state should “do more to protect innocent civilians,” (literally tens upon tens upon tens of thousands blown up, shot, starved, buried under rubble, crushed under bulldozers, etc) has made no indication that their position on this issue will change. “But democracy is at stake! We need to choose the candidate who will preserve it!” Please bffr. Genocide is as much a threat to democracy as Trump. If not more. I don’t think any of us truly realize how much of a test of our humanity we are being faced with in this moment (myself included). I don’t know it all. But I do know the gleefulness some of you are expressing at the prospect of a Black/brown/woman president weirds me the fuck out. What are you so excited about? Do we live in the same country? The same reality? Do you understand how meaningless these gestures and symbols and stories truly are as long as we don’t hold our so-called leaders accountable? Is it me????”
It’s not me. It’s this place. This country that calls itself America was forged in contradiction. A nation purportedly founded on the principals of liberty and justice for all that has genocided millions of the indigenous people of this land and enslaved millions of Black people — with no real, lasting atonement for these atrocities — is inherently contradictory. And so, it comes as no surprise that even now, after everything we’ve seen, there are people who still wish to buy into the myth of America as a true democracy.
That’s all America has ever been, really. A myth. A really good story. And the more you buy into the myth, we’re told, the more you’ll win. A lot of these people who are so excited and motivated by the idea of a Harris presidency think they want freedom but what they really want is a really good story. Trump disrupts the story because his evil is garish and unsightly and derivative and boring, he wears the top hat and the tap shoes and the cape that Toni Morrison so often spoke of.
Kamala Harris becoming president is a really good story, subtle, if not a bit on the nose. A full circle moment that also offers up some semblance of normalcy, the performance of “decency,” comfort. If that comfort comes at the expense of millions of other human lives? So be it. But comfort is not liberation. Comfort is distraction. Comfort is a gilded cage from which you can ignore the rest of the world burning around you.
But a gilded cage is still a cage, beloved. A gilded cage is a contradiction.
Recently, Harris spoke to reporters after her meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu in which she used delicate language and strategic buzzphrases like “full ceasefire” and “free all hostages,” to soothe the critics of the Biden-Harris administration’s complicity in Israel’s war crimes. “To everyone who yearns for peace, I see you, I hear you,” she said. “Let’s bring the hostages home. And let’s provide much needed relief to the Palestinian people.”
More promises that will soon turn into contradictions. More heroic words with no true action behind them. That’s America, I think. America, the land where people think a Black woman leading us through several ongoing genocides is some form of liberation. America, where they can shoot a Black woman seeking help in the face one day and declare that Black women will save us all on the next. America, land of the unfree, home of the cowardly.
The thing about pointing out contradictions is that it’s not enough to just point them out. You must sit with them a long time. You must wrestle with them, even. The reality is that we are all living contradictions. I benefit from the comfort of living at the heart of the empire. I too, am in the cage. (But grateful that at least I know I’m in a cage, chile). My major personal contradiction, these days: I believe in hope but I am hopeless.
Most days I really do believe we are a doomed species. Most days, I’m kind of even OK with that. I think a lot about that scene in Jurassic Park where Ian Malcolm says, “Dinosaurs had their shot, and nature selected them for extinction.” I think, we are the dinosaurs. We inherited a beautiful, perfect planet and destroyed it and destroyed ourselves and maybe we need to just get the fuck out of here so the Earth can heal and live on for billions of more years without our hatred and greed and petty wars. It is in these moments that I am most disappointed in myself. What does it mean to say you believe in the fight for liberation if you have no hope? If you have no hope, how can you even fight?
In any case, there’s that other line, helpful in moments of despair and dismay at the state of this world: “Life, uh, finds a way.” I mean, I’m here, aren’t I? And so are you, reading these words. And what a miracle that is. And yes, these are strange, terrifying times. And nothing makes sense. And people you thought you knew have become strangers to you, and you have become strangers to them. And politics have become entertainment. And distractions in the form of pop songs and memes and international sporting events keep falling from the sky. And bombs keep falling, too. And most days I have to trick myself into getting out of bed. And every day I remind myself that love is still a thing that exists in spite of all our contradictions.
watch
read
Poem about Police Violence by June Jordan
Hell and High Water: From Gaza to Mississippi by Mary Annaïse Heglar
The Endless Hope of Hamed Sinno by
listen
some Sunday energy: