On Kenosha
"All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in,” Toni Morrison wrote.
I think about this quote whenever I hear someone say “the American dream.” When I hear our Democratic nominees proclaim that this country is still “great”. That it is the best.
For this country to be a dream and a land of promise for some requires it to be a hell for others. That has been the nature of promised lands. Someone is left out of the promise.
“Biden Reminds Us of What America Can Be” the headlines said all last week. I didn’t. listen to the speeches in real time. I couldn’t. I don’t know that I will ever be comfortable with listening to people repeat the lie, lovingly, that this country has ever been benevolent towards any lives other than white ones. The booty is rotten. To ignore that doesn’t make it clean, it makes you covered in shit.
I used to work as a National Park Service Park Ranger. Someone sent to our office pocket copies of the US Constitution. I don’t know why they did it—maybe it was a conservative attempting to do the equivalent of a subtweet against the first National Historic site dedicated to Black history. Anyways, I took up the challenge. I was still deep in the indoctrination of my private school education—the diverting argument that if you just learned the laws written by slaveholders, better than the slaveholders descendants, you could somehow use those words to argue for your humanity and your freedom. You could somehow use the imaginations of men who could only imagine you as chattel to get free. I kept that copy of the constitution in the breast pocket of my uniform and brandished it whenever a certain kind of visitor came near me—old men in baseball caps with the names of destroyers printed across them, demanding that I admit this country was the best.
I am not sure where we move from here, when the police shoot a man seven times in the back while holding on to his t-shirt, while his children watch. When the vast majority of those in power refuse to even name what the problem is. When they take the words of our revolutionaries and turn them into a campaign slogan, a soundbite, a live laugh love but for democracy.
I’ll end with Morrison again.
“ I know the achievements of the past are staggering in their everydayness as well as their singularity. I know the work undone is equally staggering, for it is nothing less than to alter the world in each of its parts: the distribution of money, the management of resources, the way families are nurtured, the way work is accomplished and valued, the penetration of the network that connects these parts. If each hour of every day brings fresh reasons to weep, the same hour is full of cause for congratulations: Our scholarship illuminates our past, our political astuteness brightens our future, and the ties that bind us to other women are in constant repair in order to build strength in this present, now.”