[I was still in the States for the 2016 presidential election. Black friends were not prepared for hordes of white folk suddenly feeling frightened and dispossessed. They went ballistic over safety pins. White people wearing them were happily telling newly arrived Muslims in grocery stores how to prepare Thanksgiving turkeys, ignorant of the problem. No one appeared to remember that Dutch and Norwegian citizens wore safety pins under their collars during the Nazi occupation to communicate safety and friendship. On the other hand, everyone was seething about The 53%. Monsters were everywhere, gloating and intolerant.]
I. On Equality
We are all rounded up that day
Yellow stars
Green and purple stars
Pink triangles
Black triangles
Scarlet letters
Blue law breaking
Females and males
Cut and uncut
Crying with fear
Hunger and anger freezing
Our hands, now
Strapped tightly
Against bloody
Backs, the Mark of
Cain still
Smoldering on
Forehead flesh, the
Grease and filth
Of hate
Rubbed into what
Is left of our
Souls
Heaved into
Windowless boxes
We are transplanted
To chilling chambers
Where our screams
Vacuum up the
Stale air and the
Minutest symbol of
Our shattered
Identities is
Stripped from our
Shaking frames and
What we
Know of our
Selves
Shrinks
To a tiny
Spot
Terrifyingly
Small, it
Lodges
Deep inside
Each
Despairing
Body
And our Black
Blue
Green
Brown eyes
Meet
Our eyes can finally meet
Ah, we breathe
As poison fills our lungs
Equality
At last
17 November 2016
II. On the matter of safety pins
The key here is "safe," as in, "I don't feel safe after this election." Safety cuts across classes, ethnicities, queer identities, religious devotees, generations, genders and transgenders. I thought this was about ME saying I don’t feel safe? And if you don’t feel safe now, either, I am saying that you are not alone?
No, I get that it’s not that simple. In any case, I may or may not wear a safety pin and even if I do, I may or may not wear one all the time. You don’t know if I forgot to put it on or decided not to wear it that day. For that matter, you don’t know if I have a semicolon tattoo, or if it’s covered up, or if I belong to or just support those who wear it to symbolize the agonizing decision to extend rather than end their “life sentences,” razor blade in hand. You don’t know, looking at me, if I am fearful every single day that the wrong cop will stop the wrong car at the wrong time in the wrong place and my child will be in that car, my child will be shot dead because that cop cannot see my child, that cop can only see skin color. Looking at me, you don’t know if I was stranger-raped or acquaintance-raped, or if ER doctors nearly sterilized a naked brutalized girl on the operating table, you don’t know if my family disowned me for the violence that destroyed a hymen-intact virgin. You don’t know, looking at me, if I am gay or straight, a professor or poet or violinist, a citizen of this country or a different one, or of both. You don’t know. And I don’t know these things, looking at you.
But what I do know is that people wearing safety pins since last Tuesday night ARE the same people who grieve for Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Walter Scott, Sam Dubose, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray. They ARE the same people who grieve for Matthew Shepard, for Orlando, for people the world over brutally executed for falling in love. They ARE the same people who grieve for the millions of girls who bleed and scream when hands hold them down and slice off their genitals with broken pieces of dirty glass. They ARE the same people who grieve for the viciously raped and discarded bodies of women overpowered, maimed, mutilated, and murdered, who grieve for those sold into the unspeakable terror of slavery and trafficking. They ARE the same people who grieve the horrific slaughter and continual desecration of native peoples and peaceful cultures. They ARE the same people who grieve the loss of voice in this democracy, who grieve the existence of a welcoming and nurturing country and the respectful admiration of other nations. They ARE the same people who grieve the burning crosses, the graffiti of hate and swastikas, who grieve the theft of jobs and promotions lost, who grieve the vulgar interruptions of the mean-spirited and the careless violence bullies inflict on the innocent, who tire of the perpetual need to educate and forgive the ignorant and small-minded.
And the need to educate and forgive is no longer a mere exercise in self-dignity: those who require the most clarity of wisdom and the brightest light of understanding are now in the dangerous position of being able to cause more pain, more grief, more torture, more hurt, more death, to more people on this earth than ever before.
That does not mean that safety pin wearers judge oppression in a different light than before. They have not changed. Events changed around their hearts and minds, around the compassionate nature of their souls.
But the hands that reach across our splintered identities to find a new unity will no longer be given to us by the leaders we looked to for redemption—they are OUR hands. We must now keep each other safe.
III. On the 53%
So the morning after the election I ran into the [white, female] owner of my neighborhood coffee shop, walking her dog. She was walking her dog. I was shuffling my way around the block feeling like Gilead had crept up around me overnight and I had very stupidly not noticed and now it was too late. Anyway, she asked me what was wrong. I looked up surprised because, seriously, today, what’s wrong? But she seemed to be genuinely asking about my health so of course I immediately thought, shit, the 53%, she’s one of them. But then shuffling through more leaves I remembered the 58%. And the 37%. It’s not 53% of white women who voted for him, it’s 53% of the 37% of the white women among the 58% of all eligible voters who actually voted. So it’s something like 15-18% of US white women. This very rational rationalization did not help the overall nausea of waking up in a world where the improbable suddenly outshone the contingently possible, but it helped me not look at people suspiciously. At least in my neighborhood.
IV. On Being Woke
My Caucasian skin felt worse than ever before, worse than when I youthfully rejected a heritage of Nazis and slaveowners, worse than when the Wells Fargo security guard went for his gun at the sight of me and my brown baby, across the street from the university where I had just been hired as assistant professor of philosophy. This was worse, though still only the tiniest fraction of what my black friends go through daily and what my daughter would go through as she got older when her head reached the car window and we would get stopped for idiotic reasons and store clerks would follow her around the aisles before kicking her (and my credit card) out to the street. So I decided to speak to a minister friend. She’s a Methodist minister. African American.
Am I the enemy now. No, of course not, you’re woke, nobody thinks that, everybody knows you’re woke. But am I? Was I ever?
Don't matter how woke
I am
In my
Default
State of
White
Transparent
Lack of race
My Euro-mongrel face
Reflecting
Mirrors of conquered
Space
Don't matter how woke
I am
How much I
Fight
White feminist
Dick-yearning
Navy suit-wearing
Paid labor
My office sign
In initials
To throw off the
Gender police
I was a man
In drag
Monday through Friday
The Second
Shift
Waiting for me
In the
Preschool
Parking lot
Don't matter how woke
I am
Climbing stairs
In this four-story
La Jolla
Walkup
Hiding from those
Averted eyes
Outside
Fingers locking doors
Bodies hurrying across
The street
Safe inside now I’m
Climbing stairs
Holding
Diaper bags and the
Briefcase full of
Logic exams and the
Groceries and a
Jug of water
My little brown baby
Desperately
Holding on
To me
Don't matter how woke
I am
In this
Post-truth
Post-apocalyptic
Former republic of
Disunited states
Where democracy has
Never breathed for my
Black and
Brown sisters
Where freedom
Barely rings
For them
Now
28 November 2016
9 SEPTEMBER 2018
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