These offerings and musings are currently taking place on the ancestral, traditional, and stolen lands of the Seminole, Miccosukee, and Tequesta First Nations. These lands known as Miami.
These are stolen lands built by stolen people
It is Indeed All Political, and Yes It Is Politicized
Every so often, there is an emergence of particular catchphrases or words that get stuck in our public lexicon, words heard everywhere, even across the political aisle. After some time, the terms and phrases start to get misused and lose their shape and meaning. Take, for example, the word intersectionality. Last decade it was the it word, but people struggled to understand and operationalize it as a theory, which led to the term being co-opted, gentrified, and whitewashed. This often purposeful and nefarious misreading of the word was needed if one is going to mount a culture war. Therefore, we can chart a straight line between intersectionality becoming popularized with the current backlash against Critical Race Theory.
Then there is the flipside of misusing or overusing language, and that is the creation of new vocabulary. The creation of new words gives us more specificity and allows us to name the things ailing us. I am all for new words being coined and deployed to provide understanding to our oppression. For example, the word misogynoir is an excellent example. It is a word coined by Dr. Moya Bailey and made popular by Trudy @thetrudz, and misogynoir is defined as the anti-Black racist misogyny that Black women experience. Black feminism teaches us that race and gender are inseparable and animate each other. Somatically, Black women, femmes, and people read as Black women already knew how misogynoir felt in our bodies but did not have the word until 2008. So yes, to creating more words and popularizing them.
These days, however, a word that is getting a makeover and ringing very hollow in my ears is the word politic/political. In some instances, it is used as if it is a racial slur or some other type of ugly word. You hear it when people say things like, “don’t make this political,” or “x person is politicizing this issue” or some weird variation. And then there is a particular kind of person who goes out of their way to describe themselves as apolitical as if it were a virtue in need of celebration, and this is where I am completely and utterly confused by it all.
As a general rule, I think it is dangerous to build monuments to social categories and turn them into identities. Yes, I am a fat Black queer femme, but honestly, if you do not know me, what does this actually mean? It does not tell you anything about the layers and contours of my humanity or who I am politically. Indeed, the social categories of being fat, Black, and femme inform my politics, but they are not by themselves politics. To be an ethical practitioner of anti-racism, feminism, and social justice, we must go beyond social categories as definitions of the self and really hone in our praxis, aka our politics. Isn’t what we do on repetition and how we live a better measure of who we are? What governs our behavior, how do we vote, who are the people and groups we feel entangled with? How we citizen? What are the politics that we bring into our relating with others and with systems? These questions, although they do not tell me everything it gets me closer to some semblance of a picture and focal point.
And because I am more interested in what informs people’s race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. I like to think of myself and others as being sociopolitical beings. Our identities are not as fixed as we would like to think. I think they stay in flux throughout our lives and get made and remade over and over again. Yes, my race as a Black person will never change, but the three years I spent in Vancouver, Canada, changed how I understood my Blackness in a North American context forever. I went from being a person who identified as bisexual to now pansexual. I attribute this evolution to my time working with youth who articulated their pansexuality and the rise of Instagram. I realized that as I became more exposed to people across the gender galaxy it became clear that my attractions were not as binaristic as I once thought. Even the way I understand my gender today is different from how I understood it last summer. And for many people, the pandemic has changed your relationship to your body and clothing which has facilitated mini gender revolutions in many of us.
Because I understand race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, ability status, nationality, and citizen status to be co-constitutive and informed by our culture, friends, government, media, etc., I am more interested in what are the conditions that animate the social categorizations and the decisions we make based on these material conditions? Black feminism teaches me that I am a sociopolitical being because how my race, class, and gender get made in this society marks me as a particular kind of subject. I am not having the same lived experience as my white peers because their whiteness marks and stratifies them differently. One big example of this thesis is that I am financially supporting my parents, a thing that is not common for white people my age but very common among the Black women and femmes my age. My white peers have generational wealth that allows them from being their parent's retirement plan or supplementing their parent's retirement. While many middle-income Black people do not have this privilege and the conditions that created this difference are 100% a series of political choices that our nation-state created and enacted. And this is precisely the reason why I think it is impossible to make a decision that is not political.
If we truly believe that the personal is political as auntie Audre Lorde has taught us then there is never a time where the politics that govern me both externally and internally are not present in my choices or dictates the choices that I can even access. In other words, it’s all political because human interactions and life is a political project, and power is at the center of it all. It all comes back to power-sharing power, hoarding power, wielding power, exploiting the power of others, building power, co-creating power, or transforming power. Power is always already present in all human interactions, which means we are constantly making political choices.
The dictionary defines politics:
Pol·i·tics
/ˈpäləˌtiks/
noun
1. the activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power.
I want to draw close attention to how the individual is a crucial part of the definition of politics, and so is the phrase “the achievement of power.” As I stated earlier, power is always already present in all human interactions. There is a power dynamic between parents and children, romantic partners, men and women, white people and people adversely racialized, between cisgender people and transgender and non-binary people. Power resides between North Americans and people who make up the global South. Power resides between bosses and workers. Power is everywhere. Even in our friendship circles, there is someone secretly or not so secretly vying to be the Beyoncé of the crew. So if power is everywhere and at any given moment we are shaping it or relinquishing it why are we lying about life being a series of political projects and political calculations?
I am of the belief that I am a sociopolitical being because I reside inside of a nation-state. I am situated on lands colonized and stolen lands that were built up by a stolen people. These lands called The United States is a political project created by people who were escaping tyranny and who used genocide, rape, and chattel slavery to build a nation-state that would allow them to exercise their politics. If this is the genesis of the lands on which I live, play, and build my life upon tell me again how all of my choices are not political? How I understand myself as a person with a gender, race, class, citizenship status, ability status, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and nationality is all being mediated by my relationship to the state and its relationship to me. If we did not have nation-states, many of the social categories we use to make identities for ourselves would cease to matter as much as they do currently.
The United States is a messy political group project and its laws, policies, and governance decides who is worthy of life and who will be made vulnerable to premature death, precarity, and exploitation. I think this false binary that we create for ourselves that states only in certain situations one is making a political decision is intellectually dishonest. Instead of being afraid that everything is political or being politicized perhaps we should accept that yes everything is political and therefore being politicized. It may be more beneficial for us to ask ourselves what is my relationship to power and what political choice(s) does my power afford me in this moment and situation? Perhaps we should concern ourselves with how can we make better political calculations that help to either dismantle, disrupt, or divest from white supremacy. In a globalized world, every inane choice made on automatic pilot is a choice that is already mired in the exploitative and extractive geopolitical capitalistic context. It is a luxury and profound privilege to assume that in a globalized world, our individual choices are not inextricably tied to systems and structures. This is the hubris of being a North American.
VIEWINGS AND READINGS:
Black Film Archive by Maya S. Cade - This is an archive of all Black films that are currently streaming the list spans from 1915 to 1979.
Da’Shaun L. Harrison and Kiese Laymon: Belly of the Beast - by Green Apple Books. This is a great conversation between Da’Shaun Harrison and Keise Laymon about Da’Shaun’s new book that tackles anti-fatness as anti-Blackness.
How Amil Cabral shaped Paulo Freire’s pedagogy by Curry Malott - “As a result of his role as a national liberation movement leader for roughly 15 years, Cabral had become a widely influential theorist of decolonisation and non-deterministic, creatively applied re-Africanisation. World-renowned critical educator Paulo Freire, in a 1985 presentation about his experiences in liberated Guinea-Bissau as a sort of militant consultant, concludes that Cabral, along with Ché Guevara, represent 'two of the greatest expressions of the 20th century.' Freire describes Cabral as 'a very good Marxist, who undertook an African reading of Marx.' Cabral, for Freire, 'fully lived the subjectivity of the struggle. For that reason, he theorised 'as he led.'”
Seeing Blackly: Tina Campt’s A Black Gaze by Zoe Samudzi - “The Black gaze feels like an antidote to mainstream orthodoxy. It is a relation to art that seeks to transcend and refuse easy assimilation of Black art into the standard colored paradigm of representation, diversity, and inclusivity. As a writer primarily interested in Black/African/Afro-diasporic art, I have never been able to think about Black art without becoming entangled in my own subjectivity; I cannot write except from an embodied affective position. Unfortunately, I sometimes feel ashamed of this: it feels misplaced, like improper criticism that defies long-existing tropes and conventions of the impartial observer. But Campt’s Black gaze offers holistic modes of criticism, bringing her readers beyond mere detached, 'objective' responses written from a distance. Campt says the book is about how visual artists are changing how we see Blackness, but perhaps more compelling is the slow seeing and sensitive writing about art that she models.”
Friendships Are Breaking Up Over Vaccinest by Paige Skinner - “Even though COVID-19 vaccines are widely available to most American adults, some are still refusing to get a shot even as the highly contagious Delta variant rips across the country. The overwhelming majority of new COVID-19 cases in the US are among the unvaccinated. The same is true for COVID-related hospitalizations and deaths.
But the summer spike has led some parts of the US to reintroduce mask mandateseven for those who’ve had their doses. It's no wonder that fully vaccinated people are fed up.”
How Black Women Have Re-imagined Nature On-Screen by Dr. Chelsea Mikael Frazier - “So what do we make of all this? First, Blackness and femininity sit squarely in the center of the ways we imagine our environments. This centering reminds Black women (and everyone else) that it is normal, appropriate, and bewitching to witness us luxuriate in our environments and that these resources that we call 'nature' are available—not just for our work—but for Black women’s leisure, healing, and living! And, finally, it reminds Black women (and everyone else) that the issues that seem to only affect us most sharply—anti-Blackness, sexism, class oppression—are everyone else’s (ecological) problems, too.”
Inside “The Very Secret History” of The Sunrise Movement by Zahra Hirji and Ryan Brooks - “As the youth-led Sunrise Movement helped catapult racial justice to the center of the national conversation on climate change, many of its members of color repeatedly charged over the last three years that they felt 'tokenized,' 'used,' 'ignored,' and 'dismissed.'"
LUTZE SIGHTINGS:
Reading Sula on IG Live for Bookleggers Library - The Little Haiti Cultural Complex partnered with Bookleggers Library and invited me to be a featured guest on "Storytime for Grown-Ups: Little Haiti Edition." I took over Bookleggers' Instagram and read a section from Sula by Toni Morrison.
LISTENING:
The United States of Anxiety: Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Haiti and International Aid- Our very own Miami homegirl guest hosted and talked about the earthquake that Haiti just suffered and this is the nuance that is needed in a time like this.
Vox Conversations: The news is by—and for—rich, white liberals - This episode does an excellent job of laying out what is wrong with liberal media and what is at stake if it does not change.
Be Antiracist with Ibram X. Kendi Prison & Police Abolition: Finding True Safety- Ibram X. Kendi interviewed Mariame Kaba about police abolition. I was pleasantly surprised by this pairing.
Making Gay History Coming of Age During the AIDS Crisis - This was a prescient podcast season to listen to duing a global pandemic. I really enjoyed listening to gay history rooted in survival ans resistance as told by the gay men who survived this epcoch and the AIDS crises. As I was digging through the archive of this show I also found two episodes that include interviews with Sylvia Rivera. Listening to this podcast felt like queer ancestral work.
Rebel Eaters Club Fatphobia (& foodphobia) is Anti-Blackness with Da’Shaun Harrison- We don’t think about the linkages between fathpbia and anti-Blackness enough. I am currently positively obsessed with Da’Shaun and stumbled upon this podcast episode.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
My fall offerings Eventbrite page is now live to the public. Tell your friends, your family, and all your people, to go get their tickets!
