Let's Be Real for a Second
An essay on the ways we unknowingly internalize authoritarian violence
I can’t tell you how many times I rage scribbled in my writing journals. Truly. I can’t tell you because I ripped those pages out and tore them into tiny pieces. I probably burned them or burried them under my newly planted avocado tree because I need the land to help me decompose them. Things are rough and exhausting.1 Sometimes it feels like all I can do for myself is to write a colorful array of curse words documenting my feelings about this current iteration of this government called the United States.
I have known many types of violence in my short living, but the barrage of multilayered and interconnected types of violence render me quiet. Being quiet is a new experience for me.
I am very quiet right now. I read people’s words. Hold witness to their experience. I do what I can to support my family and community. I cry a lot. I journal mad. I watch hopelessness try its best to invade the edges of my periphery. The pain and violence created by this government are neverending, evergrowing experiences. The terribleness of reality has me questioning whether the horizon between fiction and reality has forgotten its job. Reality feels untrue right now. Misinformation flies, people are getting disappeared, families are being torn apart, the Earth is being further abused, and organizer/activist burnout is rampant.
Do you know what the hardest part of all of this is?
It’s the emotional labor required to keep each other safe.
I’m not talking about the emotional labor of maintaining hope. Hope is a constant for me: I’ve been a melody of hope for my entire life, that labor is nothing new to me. I’m talking about the emotional labor of knowing that “we keep us safe” includes doing protection work that will constantly have me questioning if I’m making the right choices. ICE is so violent. The greatest problem with combatting violence on this scale is that it distracts us from recognizing how we are hardening in the process. Or maybe we celebrate our hardening. I still believe that survival is a sacred action, but now I have to ask myself “at what cost?” I ask this because my intuition is starting to grasp at the ways people are championing their hurt in ways that will uplift their survival at the cost of our own.2
I feel bad for not posting much online these past few weeks. One of the reasons why I’ve been quiet in the public sector is because my self-reflexiveness has become an internal battle. I don’t want to say things in public that I haven’t wrestled with internally. It’s because I know my decisions impact the immediate and longterm future. I feel hurt, exhausted, betrayed, and weak. But I will not let any of transform me into everyhting I’m fighting against.
So, if I may, please allow me this brief moment to say the quiet part out loud and list the three ways I’m seeing authortarian violence be internalized, digested, and turned into these heaping piles of shit people want to call freedom.
1. The “sit this one out” politic
Listen. I, too, love being a part of the 92%. I wasn’t able to join a Black sorority in college, and my local AKA chapter hasn’t been answering my requests for rushing as a post-grad… so this 92% business kind of feels like that for me. But what good is championing how I voted in the past if I don’t work towards protecting voting rights in the future.
I’ve had to do a lot of reflection and boundary making with what it means to “sit this one out.” I bought into the philosophy because I was hurt and angry. It was the only tangible avenue I had to acknowledge my feelings, but having tangible avenue of expression isnt’ the same as processing and decomposing feelings. Time spent with stagnant anger feels like wasted time now that I live in/near the epicenter of ICE counter action. My neighbors were getting snatched in the street, ICE was scouting in my church parking lot, and when I learned that the Middle Passage is now a flight path because countryless immigrants are being deported to South Sudan.
I’ve lived so long enduring people who’ve belittled my opinions, disregarded my intelligence, ignored me, and humiliated me. (This 100% includes Filipino family members and Mexican in-laws who traded our relationship for their political beliefs.) I’ve experienced a lot of hurt, shame, and betrayal in my life… but I don’t have it in me to release those people to a death dealing system. No one deserves to be trafficked by the federal government as recompense for the harm they’ve caused me.
I’ve seen the words of middle class Black influencers3 who say “Black people, sit this one out” and others who’ve given a casual shrug when a tr*mp supporter’s family member gets disappeared. There is the violence of the American empire, the violence of whatever-label-they-want-to-give-themselves do-gooders who are still holding onto their belief that white saviorism is the answer and there are folks who are unaware that they’ve internalized U.S. violence by weaponinzing their “I told you so.”
Vengence is a short sighted action and Black people have a long memory. It doesn’t feel right to allow myself to allow a person (or whole peoples) who’ve disbelieved me to suffer the same or similar fate my ancestors did.
2. Playing Reaper
We’re long past the idea that westernism can play God. I mean, look at the level of destruction caused upon the planet. It is more honest and less delusional to admit that the United States and its current iteration of leadership is more infatuated with playing the Grim Reaper than with trying to take on the tasks of God. Take care of others? Nope. Make compromises to further humanity? Of course not. Keep people alive? Not a chance.
We know this place is violent.4 We are doing everything we can to keep our hearts, souls, and spirits in tact. But the bow has broken and that baby is falling. It is a luxury to pick and choose who lives and who dies… and eventually we’re going to face those decisions becauses it may be bad now but it’ll get much worse as we continue forward. I can’t speak for other countries because I haven’t lived in them, but what I know of the United States is that its infatuation with eugenics5 is moving us towards normalizing how regular-degular people having to make who-is-worth-living-and-dying decisions. And watching the normalizaiton of people playing Reaper frightens me.
I often think about the ancestor Henrietta Jeffries who was an herbalist, midwife, and mother to 18 children. She was so committed to life in her work as an rural doctoress in the early 1900s, at a time and place where medical care wasn’t readily available. When the government tried to convict her of practicing unlawful medicine (a crime punishable by hanging) the whole community stood up for her, even the white judge who many believed she had delivered into the world from his white mama’s womb. She was found not guilty. I don’t share this story as a parable for cross-cultural and interracial solidarity (but feel free to take it as that if you wish), I share this historical account becase I want to come from that long line of Black women who were so fiercely dedicated to life that even the white hands dangling the lynching rope couldn’t catch her.6
3. Celebritizing the struggle
Social media has us all messed up. I’m including myself in this equation.7 Social media is a trillion dollar industry created and upheld for the sole reason of stealing our attention and holding it with the tightest grip.8 I remember the times when folks on substack (myself included) celebrated leaving instagram just to use the same tactics to remain televised and relevant on substack.
Remember when Gil Scott Heron said the revolution will not be televised? Remember when Toni Morrison said overindulgence into public life is ruinous? What happened if we paused, stepped away from making constant relevance the standard, and listened to our ancestors?9
Celebrity culture allows us to worship people and criticize them without taking actions towards accountability. I’ve met enough celebritized influencers in my Christian author days who had the people fawning over them but never wanting to admit that these influencers were capable of harm. (I’ve also met so many wonderful people that I have a big heart for, deeply admire them, and have been instrumental in my growth. It’s not all terrible.) There’s also this factor of celebritizing the you-had-to-be-there moments (ahem, protests) that feels off to me. It feels like people lost the plot. You won’t find me in the protests or mass actions because I know me and my fine Black self will always be the first target. Expecting people with Black and brown bodies to show up at a protest to reveal how down they are for the cause is another way the internalized authortarian violence shows up in our relationships. Don’t deem people worthless — especially directly impacted people — because they can’t show up in the way a person with multiple privileges can.
Celebritizing the struggle is a form of internalizing violence because people assume they are weaker than the one who is celebritized. Egos are insatiable apetites. I’m not saying that celebritizing people will lead to imminent doom (though it can). I know folks can survive atrocity as they follow celebrities. I’m of the mindset that surviving isn’t the plot, continuance is. If we continue with celebritizing individuals then the only ones who will flourish are the celebrities and their cult followers. The only culture that flourishes and continues is the celebrity and their cult followers. How did this president get elected? It definitely wasn’t because of merit or education. Let’s not be trash and do trash things. Celebritizing isn’t it.
Community, not celebrity, is the only way forward that perpetuates a cultural continuance where everyone recognizes they, as individuals, have skillset and strengths that are invaluable to this struggle. Communities built on accountability and care, not punitive action and upholding a single narrative, have saved more lives than following a celebrity. And, as we’ve seen, a celebritized person care more about what they claim than how they’ll protect you. Power, when given to a single person, is narcissistic. Power, when shared in an interconnected system of people who are strategically using it to protect the most vulnerable, is life protecting.
I recently saw a video of a car wash manager stop ICE from taking their employees. He stood ten toes down, asked for a warrant, and told ICE that the car wash is a private business that they cannot raid.
This video is evidence of the power of collective action and public education. Celebrity didn’t teach that man how to stand up to ICE. Celebrity didn’t give him the tools to have a safety plan for his employees. Celebrity and influence can say a lot of things, but it won’t protect us in the end. We don’t need a celebrity for this movement, we need each other.
I’ve written a lot about growing up with a parent who internalized all the racist authoritarian violence he experienced in the Missippie Delta in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. I am a parent now and my fear is that I will move foward with that same ignorance. I worry about internalizing ICE and other Tr*mp policy violences then unknowingly hurting people I love and have deep affection for.10 I know I have a responsibility to my family and to the public to show up in a way that doesn’t alchemize governmental violence into my presence. You have responsibility, too. The only way we’re going to get through this is together, but we can’t do it together if we’re internalizing the very thing we’re fighting against.
Ok, it’s not just because our family just finished moving into a new house. But politics but politics makes up large sums of the whole.
and it is so exhausting/disillusioning to know how these people have the loudest voice, the most subscribers, and the biggest platforms.
Black classism is 100% a factor in this.
If this is new information to you, then welcome to my page. Don’t ask too many questions.
while contradicting itsself about being pro-life
trying to keep up with influencer culture had me in a chokehold for years.
Substack included
Hi, I struggle with this so much. There’s a level of maintaining relevance that is an expected part of upkeeping my platform as an author.
this fragment “people I love and have deep affection for” includes my readership. That’s you! I care about you.