Month: March 2024

Disgusting

.Reading time 6 minutes.

* This piece mentions sexual violence and human trafficking

As I have shared here before, I am currently studying for a PhD in Religious Studies at the University of Virginia.  This work is focused on the ethics of embodiment as a question of equity.  My specific concentration explores the way race has been created and reinforced within Western modernity.

In my pastoral training before this, I actively explored  issues of sexuality and gender as part of my ministry.  I continue to stay closely informed on the global crisis of criminalizing sexuality and weaponized government that marginalizes sexual minorities and in some cases seeks to kill them.  I am also deeply concerned with the often religiously mandated marginalization of women through both legal and extrajudicial measures.  It is shocking to look at the ways in which the United States, with its draconian roll back of women’s rights is more similar on this front to our supposed global enemies than a long-standing ally like France.  Although we give France a run for their money in terms of racist policies around migrants.

I mention my background because in her response to the State of the Union Address, Sen. Katie Britt (R – AL) invoked what I consider from my professional experience to be the most devastating perfect storm of human tragedy.  She spoke of the issue of human trafficking in the context of border control, human migration, asylum and sexual assault.  I will not paint the graphic picture that Sen. Britt did.  That would further the harm.

I would like to, instead, caution voters and politicians from all parties.  While I do not know Sen. Britt’s personal experiences, I know that as a woman, she has more than likely experienced sexualization and even sexual violence.  I cannot walk in her shoes, I cannot tell her or any woman’s story.  Her willing participation in this theatrical and opportunistic display is something she will need to reconcile with her (I assume Christian) god.  But the political machine needs to beware of leveraging stories like the one Sen. Britt recounted for political gain. Because of the numbers of women (and men) who experience sexual violence in this world, a story like this may not garner as much sympathy as it does outrage.  Too many people will hear a story like this and cringe, not because of the horror, but because it brings them back to their own trauma.  Using this reaction as a political ploy is, in a word, disgusting.

And this is where we are at politically.  No experiences, or language (thank you Marjorie Taylor Greene) are off the table.  There is no line between harm and advantage.  There is no accountability for how both policy and words create an unlivable equation of ignorance blended with numbness to violence.  If you want to score political points, just co-opt someone else’s story.  But I shouldn’t be surprised.  Sen. Britt comes from a state where lynching black men and the gruesome mutilation of their bodies was once accompanied by picnic lunches and other “festivities” (Alabama data – https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/explore/alabama ; book about the culture surrounding lynching – https://uncpress.org/book/9781469620879/lynched/).

Having spent time with both adult and child victims of trafficking; having witnessed the transactional playing field for that nightmare firsthand; having dear friends who work tirelessly around the world to extract people from this horror; having ministered to the aftermath of this violence, I believe Sen. Britt and the Republican Party need to issue a statement of apology.  Every victim of trafficking was further harmed by the careless and performative display that millions of people witnessed.  Shame on you all.  Human trafficking is not an American political football.  It is people’s often too young lives being shattered and their humanity being stripped of any sense of civilization.  Only they have a right tell their stories.  It is a testament to the resilience of the human animal that any of them survive to do so.  Far too many do not.

I don’t expect the Republican Party to do the right thing.  Their concern is fundraising to pay the legal bills of their presumptive candidate.  The brittle husk of what is left of their political agenda is preparing to evaporate into dust as the cult of personality replaces it.  In fact, while I and other people with a conscience watched Sen. Britt, sickened by her middle-school-does-Peyton-Place performance, I’m sure some of her followers were fully entertained by the arm’s length spectacle of someone else’s suffering.  They likely ate it up, along with some fried chicken and a beer…just like the good ol’ days.

–ALD

Tag Along

.Reading time 8 minutes.
Photo by Unseen Histories on Unsplash

I sent a friend a text message last night during Super Tuesday on March 5, 2024 that sums up what I think many black people and people of color voters might feel about the 2024 Presidential Election cycle:

“Watching white people decide the future of the country is not fun.”

Although this was arguably the norm in the pre-Obama era, it was less blatant and less existentially debilitating then.  Ignorance was a twisted bliss.  Particularly for those of us children of the Civil Rights Movement, there was at least the vague and performative indication that one’s vote as a black American (a long fought for right that was severely compromised in 2013) counted for something.  In 2024 however, it is simply a fact that whiteness, or really the various convulsions of whiteness are driving the politics and policies of the country.

White liberals are still congratulating themselves on Obama, whose policies by and large look like every other mid 20th century Democrat politician.  While physically so, politically Obama was not a black president.  Arguably, he shouldn’t have had to be.  Biden is a coda to Obama as well as a throwback to the Johnson/Nixon era touting an underlying message of universality and “gee can’t we all just get along”-ism that struggles against its tendency toward colorblindness and flattened playing fields.  In contrast, Trump actively courts Nazis, racist and homophobic radical Christians, and the KKK while making a place for blacks who really want to see themselves as white (I’m looking at you Sen. Tim Scott) and Latinos who already do when it is convenient (Sen. Ted Cruz, Sen. Marco Rubio).  They provide Emmy worthy theater, by playing along while not getting in the way…yet staying in camera shot.

But Emmys are given for fiction and our politics actually change people’s lives.  The phalanx of white men currently closing ranks around our national decision making is an odd mix of impotent liberals and rabid conservatives who have never had to consider gestation inside their bodies, or what it means to be the target for gun violence because from a distance you might look like someone, or being shut out of housing or jobs because you talk with sibilance. But they want to convince us that they really do have everyone’s best interest at heart, and we should all just tag along.

But tagging along with, that is “trusting”, someone who has no idea what a life lived outside of the safety of being a white penis holder has never served those of us without that embodied experience well.  Voting is more difficult now if you have brown skin, having a uterus is more difficult whether you identify as female, male or trans and I can already hear the key in the lock on that old closet door, ready to swing open to welcome the gays back in.  While the dominant white men in politics and academics see this as a natural ebb and flow of “society”, for the rest of us it is life and death.

Electing Barack Obama was the best and the worst thing possible for the United States.  It was the best thing because 220 years of white male rule seems like a lot in a country that is only 236 years old.  My goodness, not even Great Britain did that.  It was the worst thing because it exposed the reality of American ignorance about what representative government actually is.  Or maybe it just laid the true bias and bigotry bare?

Back in the day, one of the arguments against women achieving the vote as well as the argument against blacks having the vote after emancipation was that women and non-whites were not capable of holding the responsibility for civic duty.  This seems odd considering the rather central role women have in literally creating life and the fact that illiterate white men who led lynch mobs to wantonly kill blacks could vote.  The legacy of questioning the capabilities of non-white, non-male individuals is built into the system, codified in law and regularly reasserted in policy.

But in 2024, non-white is nearly dominant and non-male has been dominant for decades in this country.  If we look at the representative reality, neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden should be president of the United States.  Not intending to be ageist, it is impossible to look at global demographics and international leadership without seeing them both as fossils. Neither of them will be capable of solving the crisis at the border because they have only literally flown in and flown out of that situation.  Neither of them can solve the problems of US involvement in international war because their experience of conflict is at existential arms length (more so for Trump).  Neither of them can understand the conflict in Gaza because their understanding of the region and the people involved will always be academic at best and trope based at worst.  These are not leaders for a modern world.

The United States is at a crossroads.  It is dragging its elderly politicians to places they are ill equipped to go.  It is silencing the voices of its diverse electorate through gerrymandered voting maps and restrictive voting policies, to keep the myth of a status quo happy.  Through what can only be called radical judicial decisions, it is enabling criminals and dismantling the one guardrail that we have.

There is a deep irony in that Trump is noted for regularly making the case to “take our country back.”  I would say he’s right.  But the people who need to act on this mandate aren’t at his rallies.  They aren’t white and they don’t stand to pee.  Women, brown people, immigrants, “minorities” of all kinds…that’s whose labor (both kinds) built this country, that’s who has kept it going, that’s who has always innovated and who has always made a way out of no way.  This is who needs to take it back.

It’s time for the white guys to tag along,…if they can keep up.

–ALD