From the Land of Milk & Honey to ‘Merica!’: Looking for conversation on justice
How Liberals and Progressive hypocrisy perpetuate violence by leaving out the class struggle.
I have lived in the Holy Land for the better part of the last six years and have not come home at all in the last two. I spent the last seven weeks touring the United States. In those 42 days, I gave a total of 38 presentations, interviews, and discussions on Israel-Palestine, justice, and the intersections of justice movements. I spent the last few weeks running that 66 Corridor in Michigan, from Lake City to the south to Grand Rapids and Lansing, meandering through those small towns of Marion, Barryton, Edmore, Stanton, and others. I’ve completed the entire circle of Mitten, rolling down from Traverse City to Kalamazoo to Lansing to Detroit and north again. I love taking back roads rather than expressways and seeing all the old stone farmhouses, the family-run diners, locally owned machine shops, and all that comes from traveling in the rural United States — also known by some as TrumpLand. It’s a reminder of how different things are in the rural areas and how much more at home I feel in these communities. Even the smell of freshly spread manure was a welcome home and brought me back to my days running around near Bard Rd. in Gladwin County. I have never liked the idea of “pay first” gas stations. In these communities, you pump and then pay. People welcome you with greetings that are different. I held the door open for an older man who had obviously just left the farm — his rubber boots were covered in mud and his Carhart hat covered in chaff. He said, “Thanks, young man!” as he walked through the door. When I paid for the gas, the cashier asked, “Do you need anything else today, honey?”
When I arrived in the United States, I spent the first couple of weeks in Florida before heading to Michigan. My first meal back in the United States was at a Margaritaville on the beach, surrounded by live music and transplants from New England and Canada. Driving inland the next day, I was struck by the endless pastel-colored gated communities and sprawling commercial plazas. Nobody called me honey. It was a sharp reminder of how just how different parts of the United States can be from one another, not just in terms of weather and landscape, but also in history and culture. We operate differently in these spaces in various ways, as they are built on different norms. From the Middle East to Florida to Michigan, there are subtle expectations, social norms — or rather cultures — in each distinct community that are to be both appreciated and challenged.
I remember the first time a big Palestinian guy grabbed me by the hand and held it as we walked around. That was something completely new to me and felt uncomfortable and awkward at first because it just wasn’t something I was accustomed to. You need to be open-minded in order to be at ease in new and different situations. Within the geographic space of the Holy Land, there are so many differences in the experiences of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities. Even inside of those communities, there are cultural shifts between liberal and conservative spaces that require willingness to engage with the nuances of each in order to respect and critique them.
When I think about all the conversations I’ve had over the years around culture and society, I am struck by the underlying message of many of those discussions. People often argue that simply because cultures and societies are different, it doesn’t mean that they are better or worse. Many argue that we have to ask ourselves before making judgments or acting on them: as people who are not members of these communities, should we be imposing our own beliefs on other people?
During my trip, I found myself wondering how many of us take the same approach in the United States when talking about different parts of the country as we do other foreign cultures?
When we walk into the local store, are we trying to remember that the clerk and consumer have probably known each other for many, many years, since it is the only party store for miles? Are we remembering that, over generations, these communities have been developing and evolving their own social norms and concepts of morality in their own culturally unique ways?
As I traveled across the United States, I was reminded of the rich cultural histories belonging to each community, some parts of which can be inspiring and others dark and nasty. More importantly, I am reminded that simply by virtue of my status as a U.S. citizen, I am not an expert on every community in the country. In many ways, not only am I not an expert, but I am also not even a member of that community. And as I continue to engage in justice work and unpack for myself the systems of oppression that continue to perpetuate violence, I see the ways in which we perpetuate a kind of cultural hegemony across the county not unlike the cultural hegemony that perpetuates colonialism across the globe.
So here we are stuck in this place: We see what we believe to be oppression, violence, and injustice in communities we don’t belong to. And we don’t know at what point — if at all — we should interject. Do we point out the racism, sexism and other forms of oppression we think we see at play in communities that we don’t belong to — whether that is in Palestine, Miami, Detroit, or different rural communities across the United States? It’s kind of a catch-22. On one hand, there is an argument that if we don’t belong to that culture, then we don’t have a right to intervene. On the other hand, there is the argument that the moral imperative to fight for justice is of a higher order than cultural differences.
I can’t help but see a layer of hypocrisy within these movements for justice. In these movements, we often hear ourselves saying that we need to be led by the oppressed and marginalized groups. Within the struggle for human rights in the Holy Land, many organizations pride themselves on being “Palestinian led.” This makes sense because in doing this work, we don’t want to impose our own systems onto the indigenous population in their struggle to secure human rights and justice. We don’t want to continue to perpetuate or contribute to colonization. Yet, when it comes to liberal or progressive individuals and organizations here in the United States, this model of engaging with anti-hegemonic social justice work falls apart when the work is done in the rural parts of the United States by advocates who often don’t belong to those communities or cultures. Progressive and liberal circles talk about the marginalized and oppressed white working class in these rural spaces as the problem rather than recognizing and acknowledging where they fit into the system and including them as part of the solution. In other words, we need to examine class-based oppression with the same scrutiny as we consider oppression on the basis of race, gender, and sexuality.
In these conversations around rural communities of the United States, I often hear people using adjectives such as uneducated and backward. I hear others describe the religions in the region as oppressive and sometimes even treat them as if they are superstitions. These conversations work within the same colonial framework that legitimized the oppression of countless communities the world over by imperial powers such as the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Israel, the United States and many others. From the racial discourse used to justify the ethnic cleansing of indigenous people of Turtle Island by the U.S. government to the security narrative that underpins Israel’s decades-long military occupation of the Palestinian people and the expropriation of their lands and resources, oppressive language across culture, race, ethnicity, religion, class, and sexuality has provided the framework for legitimizing violence and exploitation.
While in prison in the 1930’s in Italy, Antonio Gramsci talked at length about this phenomenon and how the progressive and liberal political agenda simultaneously worked against and with the different layers of the oppressed society to exacerbate the class warfare that led to the rise of fascism. A harbinger of sorts, Gramsci builds the case that we cannot be selective in the different layers of oppression and violence that we working to reorganize into systems of justice, and that it is our unwillingness to address the class-based oppression will keep us perpetually entrenched in a broken dialogue. Our discussion of justice must live at the intersection between our cultural sensitivities and undoing systems of class warfare, while also having the conversations that leads to accountability and change.
