Everyday Superheroes

I’m thinking a lot about superheroes these days. In this moment, more and more everyday people are being pushed to discover their superpowers.

Put your mask on. Change the world wearing pajamas.

Lets recall the most common characteristics of superheroes:

• Almost always, they have endured trauma. Often, they’ve lost people who loved them and saw the unique beauty in them as children. Or they weren’t treated right as kids and want to protect everyone else from that kind of pain.
• Are usually the underdogs. You see them waiting tables, living in poor/working-class communities, getting passed up for the promotion again.
• Struggle, but always with a sense of humor.
• Sense the injustice or imbalance of power others are not sensing.
• Are created by failure of the systems. Failure of systems — like the police state — to provide safety, dignity or belonging. The problems that arise when systems allow individual men to amass way too much power and wealth. (Fade out maniacal laughter… Muah-ha-ha…).
• Take brave action. It’s not that they aren’t afraid but that they’re even more afraid of what they would turn into if they did not act on their conscience. So they give it their best shot. And in testing their own limits, they find they have more power than they thought they had.

Who Are The Superheroes?

In the midst of this global coronavirus crisis, we see more and more people turning into superheroes before our very eyes all around us. They are joining the single moms, Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC), disabled, queer and poor folks who have been doing way more than they should have to to survive all these years. Just to be clear, most of these folks did not sign up to be heroes.

• Dr. Li Wenliang of Wuhan province who was one of the first to sound the alarm despite the grave risk to his job— even his safety as he was immediately perceived as a critic of the Chinese government. Dr. Li died on February 7 from the 2019 novel coronavirus at age 33. But in his final months, he walked a thankless and lonely road carved by my personal favorite superhero Chicken Little while the authorities accused him of telling lies and tried to make him seem untrustworthy. Right through the end, he put curiosity, care, and concern over status and personal gain.
• The nurses, nursing home workers, and other frontline medical workers protesting unsafe conditions. Unsafe for the patients, for themselves, for their colleagues, and for their families. They continue to battle the coronavirus in the hospitals while also battling an inept economic and political system that has severely eroded public health and health care. (ie., systemic failure)
• Essential workers going on wildcat strikes to protect themselves and others even under extremely anti-union environments like Instacart, Amazon, Whole Foods (oh — same thing), Purdue Farms. Where they were already unionized, workers have led transformative demands like the demand to rehire laid off workers and shift production to ventilators at the GE plant in Lynn, Massachussetts.
• Disabled people letting others into the worlds they’ve created because non-disabled people weren’t looking out for the needs of everyone. All the folks who couldn’t come out to a public meeting or action because those spaces were not accessible or because of the amount of labor it would take to get there. They are the ones now teaching the people who never noticed they were missing how to survive in a world gone virtual. Many disabled folks are showing us how to organize mutual aid and creating COVID-19 mutual aid networks. Disability justice activists have learned a lot about meeting needs in ways that are mutual, respecting boundaries and dignity. They are exercising superpowers to share all those hard-earned lessons in a time when their bodies are also extremely vulnerable to the virus and the impacts of shelter in place.
• Immigrant youth and Black-led organizing to encircle prisons and ICE detention facilities with cars almost daily until they begin releasing people from these unsafe and inhumane conditions.
• BIPOC folks writing radical speculative fiction and science fiction to help us all see the new worlds on the horizon.

I could go on…

• Teachers and other educators…
• Farmers & food service workers …
• Parents & care providers …

So what are some takeaways for the rest of us who are getting ready to test our powers?

• Put on your mask first. Then help others.
• Bring attention to the injustices others weren’t calling out.
• Be brave. Go where you didn’t think you could go before. Not in the toxic masculinity/ableist way of risking life. But in the ways only your unique self can weave a web of relationships or creativity or spreadsheets or care based on your networks, skills, experiences, spidey senses.
• Trust yourself.
• Don’t use the mask to hide your vulnerability. It may be just the superpower the world needs right now.
• Though it may be awkward at first, invite other superheroes in your midst to get together (virtually of course). You need your family, crew, squad, collective, or posse. Love each other and have each others’ backs (at a safe distance). Practice talking directly to each other about your idiosyncrasies and what you need to feel safe. The fear will subside and the trust will flow.
• Change the world.
• Wear pajamas while doing it.

Glad to be connected to you through this web.

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A few sidenotes and disclaimers:

To be clear, not all superheroes are role models — Batman makes me want to throw up.

Yes, Marvel and DC make it seem like superheroes are disproportionately white, able-bodied, cis-gendered, masculine-identified, and well-off but we all know that in the real world the underdogs are often the queer, trans, Black/Indigenous/People of Color (BIPOC), gender non-binary, womyn, femme, fat, young, old, poor, and disabled people.

If you come from privilege, find your crew and redistribute wealth– the superpower to transfer power! Robin Hood is one of my favorite super heroes. No strings attached — trust that people in need know how to use scarce resources wisely.

Shoutouts to the superhero squads of the Nurses Unions, Disability Justice Culture Club, Sins Invalid, California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance (CIYJA), Movement for Black Lives, Teachers & Education Workers Unions, Gig Workers Collective, generative somatics, and the translocal squads organizing through #HomesForAll, #CancelRent, Climate Justice Alliance and It Takes Roots.