Читать книгу Abolitionist Socialist Feminism - Zillah Eisenstein - Страница 11

III. AFTER TRUMP’S VICTORY

This is a historical moment in need of a bit of theory, meaning connecting the dots between disparate actions in order to see the linkages and see each other. The resistance is mixed and intersectional and wildly chaotic but in a productive way. Yet it has gotten ahead of its theory. Terms like left, liberal, radical, feminist, progressive, are in motion and disassembling. And terms describing Trump, such as protofascist or prefascist or totalitarian, are not nuanced enough to name, and therefore see, the misogynist racist excesses of this regime.

The day after the inauguration there was the spectacular outpouring of resistance by millions in the Women’s March on Washington and its sister actions, a mammoth mass demonstration against Trump on the streets of cities and towns across the globe. The marches were mixed racially, even if still predominantly white. And women of color led many of them.

I am ready to recognize the importance of learning from this amazingly successful action. If it was not radical or revolutionary enough for some, it still offers a fertile site for further radicalization. So what is there important to say about these marches that followed Trump’s election, if you forget the hacks and voter suppression and three million more votes for Clinton.

The right wing of this country is not the majority. The alt-right, although it garners a lot of visibility, is a small minority, though a frightening one, armed with guns. Their racist and sexist assaults against civility have invigorated and mobilized large numbers of people. As Trump tries to keep his true believers, his so-called base, happy, he potentially energizes everyone else.

The rest of the people that Trump loves to hate—taxi drivers, restaurant workers, nurses, women of all colors and classes, the new working class, immigrants, undocumented students throughout the academy, Muslims, Black Lives Matter, Showing Up for Racial Justice, Planned Parenthood, Jewish Voice for Peace, Black Women’s Blueprint, Movement of Movements, Standing Rock, the American Civil Liberties Union—are all resisting. There are many more of us occupying, protecting, rising, overcoming, resisting, trying to be ungovernable, than there are of them.

Women and men, trans, white and other colors, abled and disabled, the bigger “we” that Trump insists on punishing and excluding, have taken to the streets at every opportunity to build a resistance in the hopes of destabilizing his regime. Many have refused to normalize the orderliness of Trump’s administration and continually highlight the misogynist and racist commitments made by him and his appointees.

Yet how to see and name this particular political moment? The Electoral College, a leftover of slave-state privileged interests, parades as a democratic safeguard. Instead, it inhibits the voices of the most aggrieved. The two-party system that is supposedly essential to democratic choice, offers little and instead creates gridlock and dysfunction. This dysfunction is used to justify neoliberal restructuring and downsizing and yet nurtures rebellion at the same time. Maybe this is the singular moment that inadvertently exposes both the function and dys-function of white supremacy in capitalist patriarchy. It is not unimportant that Trump follows our first Black president, even if Obama was no radical on racial issues.

In this critical time, Trump and his regime attempt to prop up misogynoir for the ailing capitalism they love so dearly. They cling to a misogyny that emboldens white supremacy, oblivious to its anachronisms and violence. Trump uses multiple hatreds and animus, thinking he can bulldoze an economic recovery into being. He bellows forth a cacophonous call to arms. I hope that he will assist in his own destruction. But this cannot happen on its own. It is crucial that the resistance stay simultaneously mobilized and disruptive, multipurposed and unified.

Trump speedily executed executive orders and decrees when he came into office, reinstating the global gag rule, disallowing even the mention of abortion to all the women of color across the globe, supporting settler colonialism by reissuing access rights to the Dakota Access and Keystone Pipelines, making full-blown enemies where they did not previously exist of immigrants and refugees, especially those from Muslim countries.

Huge acts of resistance filled airports throughout the country as Muslim travelers were detained and refused entry. Mass protests greeted Trump’s disavowal and dismembering of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). As well, his anti-immigration zero tolerance policy, separating and detaining young children from their parents, mobilized new segments of activists.

A majority of whites did not support the thuggery of Charlottesville, although Trump did. Trump tweeted that football players who #TakeAKnee should be fired. He called them sons of bitches. He then antagonized not only the NFL, but the NBA also, condemning as unpatriotic anyone who did not stand for the national anthem and the flag.

Colin Kaepernick took a knee to make a statement against police brutality and racist injustice. Trump insisted that his own remarks had nothing to do with racism and were about patriotism. It is lost on Trump that the anthem, the nation, and patriotism are mired in a history of racism.

At this point, more and more players are kneeling with Kaepernick and speaking out against Trump. I am hoping that the mobilization continues even though team owners will be fined if players do not stand for the anthem. I also hope that a more sustained critique of structural racism will develop further. And back to the mothers who Trump says are the bitches. Yet the NFL is mired in numerous allegations of domestic abuse by its players, and the physical brutality of the sport with its horrific head injuries is hardly a location of people’s liberation. Nevertheless, there are important sites of resistance from within.

How can these reform movements become revolutionary? Is it possible that because the problem of racist heteropatriarchal capitalism is interlocking, assaults aimed at a single site can disarm and weaken the entire foundation? There may not be a woman president at present, but there are many women leading the resistance in its many forms. Much of the radicalization surrounding electoral politics can morph into unknowable achievements, as demonstrated in the 2018 midterm elections.

If focusing on a part may destabilize the whole, this may mean that the relationship between reform and revolution is redefined as more of an integral process rather than separate and in contradiction. If there is not a single mode of production to attack, but multiple sites that protect the interlocking structure of racist capitalist patriarchy, do reformist politics become a revolutionary possibility? Contemplate with me the demands for single-payer health care, an end to racist policing, and full access to abortion, contraception, and reproductive justice, and imagine how they might help move along the revolutionary process that has already begun.

New questions that need to guide the work are: Is capital so malleable that it is able to absorb modernized systems of gendered racism? Is misogyny so malleable that it can still oppress most women while allowing others to hold positions of power? Can white supremacist capitalist patriarchy withstand substantial racial redefinition and still deliver the necessary exploitative systems? Can white supremacy have Black men and women ruling? The massively popular film Black Panther comes to mind. Can Blacks rule a Wakanda in the real world? Can Black women warriors bring the peace that we wish for or will the powers that be regroup to prevent such a world?

Capitalism needs more than an update. It needs more than a modernization that would bring multiple and diverse people to positions of power. Rather, it needs every kind of reform leading to and demanding revolution.

Because the problem abolitionists face is complex and multiple, questions that center on capitalism and sideline its white privilege and misogyny are, more than ever, insufficient. The predator-in-chief has made clear for all to see that misogyny (he will grab our pussies if he wants to) and whiteness (his base is white and he will throw everyone else under the bus) are key to saving capitalism.

Just maybe, global capitalist greed is undermining its golden rule. Instead of protecting and occluding the racist heteropatriarchal underbelly of capitalism, Trump upends it by exposing the usually well-kept secret that capital couldn’t do much of what it does if it didn’t use patriarchy and its deep roots/routes of modernized settler colonialism and chattel slavery to garner its profits.

So it is no surprise that Trump claims to defend white working-class men and promises them their jobs back. But it continues to amaze me that this is never described as identity politics. The putdown of identity politics is usually reserved for people of color and white women. Only those who criticize the racist, sexist, heterogendered, able-bodied, unfair structuring of citizenship and political life are categorized as indulging in identity politics.

But those of us critiquing the system are paving a new path. Audre Lorde pointed to the master’s tools and the master’s house, suggesting that they cannot resolve our dilemmas. Rosa Luxemburg understood that revolution cannot be bounded by limited imagination. Let some of us in the resistance call out the failed two-party system. Let many wonder about a third party if they must. Let some call for an end to nationalism and US exceptionalism and the wars necessitated by it. Let others demand an end to climate catastrophe and the destruction of the planet. Let still others imagine a whole new structural apparatus for communities living in a borderless global world.

Following Audre and Rosa, abolitionists need to dream beyond what feels like possibility. We need to mobilize our different movements of many distinct voices into a risk-taking set of coordinated actions. It is for those of us, especially privileged white people, to listen carefully and put our bodies on the line wherever they are needed, between the police and their militarized actions, and alongside our brothers and sisters of color in everyday life.

So feminists need to be and can be simultaneously diverse and unified and multipronged in our visions. Alicia Garza of Black Lives Matter says that the time to act is now, so embrace whoever is ready in this moment. Those of us who are antiracist can unite for the planet and our bodies against Trumpism and its cabal of violators and predators. S/exploitation is key to this system and must be destroyed along with its racial practice of domi/nation.

There are new possibilities to resist, as global capital has demanded the mobility of labor, threading many sites of colonial power, from Europe to the United States, creating a new majority/minority white status. Whiteness is exposed as a minority global characteristic more readily than before, now that the once predominantly white United States struggles to live its supremacist lie at home. And now that countries like France and Germany can no longer spin their white majority standing as one and the same with supremacy. White people have always been a minority in Africa, Asia, and South America. This will soon also be true in the United States and Europe, although as the white apartheid rule in South Africa showed, minorities can and do seize power.

It is essential to know and recognize that the right-wing nationalist, fascist, xenophobic, misogynistic takeover—by Trump, Modi, Putin, Erdogan, Assad, Duterte, and Bolsonaro—is global. Or as Priya Gopal, who writes about colonial and postcolonial literature, says, if the United States had been paying attention in 2014, it would have begun to worry when Modi, a known fascist, won the presidency of India, a country with one-sixth of the world’s population. When Trump spoke at the UN, declaring his policy of America First, and encouraging other nations to follow the same tack by making their own nations the priority, none of this would seem to make any sense for global capital. So beware.

It should be no surprise that women of color, especially Black women, voted against Trump in overwhelming numbers. Yet too many white women, across all class lines, did not. It remains to be seen whether the tenuous yet promissory stance and status of white women can be mobilized for abolitionist feminism. There is no way for this to happen without politicizing the racist misogyny of Trump and all these other right-wing regimes.

“We,” the big we, need to find our unity while recognizing our fabulous differences. Black Woman’s Blueprint asks us to do this. They mobilized women of color for the Women’s March by calling forth a specified agenda that included the needs of all women across class and racial lines. Former congressperson Luis Gutierrez did this when he said he would walk in the Women’s March with his wife and daughter because he cared about every slight to every human right.

This political moment can mobilize a new collaboration and a new solidarity that initiates a new revolutionary movement. We, the resistance, must be inside and outside, focus on both the legal and extralegal, be uncompromising and compromising and supportive and embracing of each other. Difference and conflict must be acknowledged and not feared in order for this new movement to grow.

Voices of critique from women of color are opportunities, not condemnations. At moments, demands will be specific and singular. Other times demands will be inclusive. Often the politics will have to be vague and unknown and unsettling.

No one fully knows how or why Trump won. No one really knows exactly who this elusive white working class is that voted for him. Or why the Democrats undermined Bernie Sanders and chose Hillary Clinton. Nor do we know exactly how the new working classes of women of color across the planet will become the new revolutionary hope. But Ai Jen Poo of the National Domestic Workers Alliance is already hard at work on this: working toward a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights and building liaisons between women workers across the economy.

This moment calls for women of color to go forth and lead the next revolutionary movement. Remember to use what was incredible about your foremother’s brilliance and make it better. I am with you, listening and collaborating as more than ally, as an abolitionist sister comrade, freedom fighter, in this struggle to finally upend white supremacy’s gendered and capitalist abuse. When we are doing the work together, a new world comes forward for each of us.