I wanna know who my enemies are so that I can look them in the face when I kick their ass.
These were the words of my professor on what it means to have a president-elect who brings to the surface and legitimizes the hatred and ignorance we’ve seen in the last year and reveals the true colors of America. We had an hour-long discussion in class about the election, one of the most rich discussions I’ve had since the results. It indicts both sides and issues a clarion call to those of us who are truly committed to change. Below is my synthesis of our discussion:
One of the most powerful things she said is that with Trump nothing is different, it’s that everything is revealed and heightened. We now look each other in the face knowing who we are. It’s not that Clinton or a third-party candidate would have abolished the issues now brought to the forefront, it’s that everyone would have remained polite and shrouded in the process of procedurals. But the masks are off now, the racist, sexist, xenophobic, bigots, who always were are now empowered to come out of hiding. As she said, “Culture doesn’t change, it distracts us by pretending to change.”
I asked her what it means to “kick their asses” and she suggested that kicking their asses resides in the work of being broadly and deeply read on the issues, not just the glamorous ones that the media disseminates but the ones no one is talking about that has the most impact on lives. The work of kicking asses is unglamorous and won’t be anything the media wants to write about– which signals that everything the media writes about and packages to us represents very little of what we ought to be concerned about.
Trump’s ascent represents a country taken in by the spectacular, the spectacle and, I think the grotesque–think Ubu Roi for those familiar with Jarry’s work. But we have to move away from that and begin extremely dirty work that we won’t even be able to talk about for a while—this is important, reminiscent of Gil Scott Heron’s “Revolution Won’t Be Televised. The work we need to do is heavy, we all have to become students and read, comprehend, and synthesize the system more deeply than we have ever. This will be unglamorous that we won’t be able to hashtag, but it will be necessary to dismantle the power currently in place, Trump, Clinton–yes Clinton had the kind of power that must be dismantled too, it wasn’t so obviously insidious but it would have still ensured we didn’t tackle head-on what is ailing this country–and others. The work of resistance and revolution that will get us over in the next four years ain’t gonna be for or on social media. It’s going to be on the backside of the mountain studying, strategizing, and executing plans. It’s the kind of work no one will pat you on the back for because they won’t even know your name. It’s the kind of work that will necessitate we sacrifice our comfort en masse as some of our sisters, brothers and others have already been doing. It’s the kind of work that will require collectivity and building together, no independent rogues and cliques, but cooperatives across communities, cities, and states. This is anti-absorption, anti-visibility, anti-legibility work. And it starts with getting your political weight up and learning how to read this system. Here are a couple of places to start, as a warmup to the much heavier lifting to come:
The people must know before they can act.Ida B. Wells
Nicole Symmonds 