Subjugation and Racism is America’s Birthright

This is Not Our First [Human] Rodeo

This is it. This is the moment where you realize this is not a practical joke. This is not a comedy of errors. This is real life. This is real politik. This is conscious subjugation. This is abuse of power. This is the rally cry of white patriarchy saying “I am stronger than you and I will drink the blood of your brown children if I damn well please.”

You may be horrified and disgusted. Beside yourself with despair. But this present moment is a straight line from our past. America is a nation built on genocide and slavery. We literally killed millions of people to claim the land we call ours, to defend these borders.

Over the past 150 years, marginalized people have worked — slowly and steadily — to take power away from the death grip of white patriarchy. Millions of Americans died to end slavery. Women went to jail for demanding the right to vote. Black power demanded an end to Jim Crow and the passage of civil rights legislation. But in the past 50 years, that death grip has once again grown stronger. White libertarianism is the new specter of white domination. The promise of personal responsibility has provided cover for rich white men to reconsolidate power. To deny the rising tide of equity and inclusion that so many of us have worked to build.

People talk a lot about “values” in leadership, but this is often a gesture to false unity that isn’t well scrutinized or defined. Until we confront a moment of crisis. Children in cages? Separated from their parents? As young as nine months old? This is institutional child abuse. This violates our deepest sense of what is right and wrong. Of care. Of compassion. Of child survival. White patriarchy co-opted a culture of penile imprisonment as a workaround for the end of Jim Crow. And now we are turning that culture of imprisonment on children and we say no.

There’s no doubt we need to do something about this immediate crisis. Protest at the airport. Show up outside detention centers. Climb walls. Defy security officers. If you are white, take the privilege of your physical safety under the law and use it to protect those who are less privileged. Use your voice — your social channels — to show the injustice you witness to the world. Stand up and say this is not okay.

This is necessary. But it’s insufficient to actually change the game. The foxes have taken over the hen house and lots more people than immigrant children are going to die before we get out of this mess.

Getting out of this mess means actually scrutinizing the systems of power we’ve normalized and looking at how they have institutionalized oppression and violence. How they have created a culture of white supremacy that we accept ipso facto without objection. How we are all *still* complicit in a culture of whiteness.

Things to think about:

Democracy: a system of political organization created by rich white men to preserve their control of property.

Incarceration: a system of social control that punishes black bodies to ensure they remain less powerful than white bodies.

The Electoral College: A compromise of electoral democracy that values white bodies more than black bodies.

These are the things that create a culture of plutocracy like the one that elected Donald Trump.

We must protest the present violation to our values. But we must also interrogate our past to create a different future. We have to be willing to do the long hard work, not just show up with a sign.