Everyone you're looking at is also you
"The world is held together, really it is, held together by the love and passion of a very few people." -- James Baldwin
I don’t know what it means to be human, anymore.
All I’ve been doing the last several years, it feels, is just having distressing conversation after distressing conversation about the state of our species. On the macro and micro level, there is this feeling of an impending doom I like to think has followed every generation of our unique animal selves as we’ve confronted history, and maybe it’s because this is the moment I am living now, but the history I am confronted with on a regular basis often feels like a syndicated television show about white supremacy and the state apparatus.
I am writing this newsletter in the wake of the ongoing destruction of Gaza, which is to say, I am writing this newsletter while I am being forced to watch a genocide occur in real time. Dehumanization is a long game. In this case, the last seventy five years of occupation, of theft of land, of exile, of being stateless, of being erased little by little day by day, is coming to it’s solemn conclusion — the eradication, the extermination, the elimination, the erasure of yet another group of human beings.
Outside of my Palestinian and anti-Zionist Jewish comrades, very few people I know have bothered to talk to me about the genocide of Palestinians we are all watching unfold before our very eyes in certain terms. One of my very best friends (who has an incredible sense of justice) and I just grieved together via text message exchange. I told her I am beginning to realize what our species cannot survive any longer is state control and that the last few days have firmly turned me into a state abolitionist and, further, an anarchist.
I have always been these things, I think, but language is important in shaping our realities, in being able to help us design the world we inhabit and so I feel both an opening and a closing occurring within me as if something significant has revealed itself to me from the archive of my mind that will make clear what role I will play in the coming days of decolonization.
I will always return to my education in South Florida in the 1990s because I know not only how that decade shaped me as a citizen, as a person, as a human being, but how it impacted both the US and the globe.
I spent my middle school years at a Christian prep school at the height of the early 90s gay panic and as the fascist far right political party was pushing historical revision by introducing the concept of “creationism” as a means of attempting to turn the tide in which (white) Americans were becoming increasingly pro-science, atheist, and as such, not attending church — one of the primary spaces of white supremacist Christian fundamentalist propaganda — which meant the minoritarian rule they’d established post Reconstruction was beginning to wane.
I, and everyone of my generational cohort who had the misfortune of being educated in the state of Florida, were being experimented on, manipulated by the state apparatus.
While I had learning a little bit about World War II and the holocaust, I didn’t learn anything about Palestine. I was growing up in a Christian fundamentalist cult and so what I did learn about Israel is based on a book whose historical archive often cannot be verified due to it’s constant manipulation by, you guess it, various state apparatuses throughout human history.
What I am trying to say here is I literally didn’t know Palestine existed because I was taught that it didn’t exist.
It’s like how many Americans are often shocked to find out Indigenous Americans still exist — we were taught in school (you know, where they do the indoctrination of children) not only were there a scant handful of “them” here in the first place (if you can call a nation of almost 300 million people ‘scant’) and there were so few remaining Indigenous American people when the country was colonized, they may as well have not existed.
I, however, went to school with quite a few Seminole and Dine kids. I knew they existed—I saw them everyday at school and built relationships with them. To me, they were real living and breathing people. Not just a bygone idea of a group of people in a history book or in a religious text.
I didn’t meet a Palestinian person until I moved out of Florida to go to college in Chicago.
What does it mean to harm nothing? If you never existed in the first place, how can you be eradicated?
The burden that is proof of existence: to constantly say, I am here, and I am a human, too, like you. Proving one’s existence is difficult work, especially as an occupied other. As a subjugated other. As the other as The Enemy. By the time we have reached this stage in the genocide process, there is nothing to prove one’s existence but one’s self, a self fractured by exile, by dispossession, by erasure of history, of culture, of language. Then you are just a bygone idea and your physical body becomes representative of this idea that hasn’t existed in the minds of men for centuries and that makes you a memory, a specter, a nothingness. It is so much easier to kill, to maim, to erase, to cleanse an idea, a memory, a specter.
What does it mean to harm nothing? If you never existed in the first place, how can you be eradicated?
Quick history lesson: The State of Israel is seventy five years old, which is to say, Palestine has been occupied by the Israeli state apparatus for the last seventy five years. Israel exists by means of partitioning — partitioning is a ‘benign’ way of saying apartheid, an even ‘kinder’ way of saying segregation, a ‘gentle’ means of making lawful mass eviction which is to say ethnic cleansing, which is to say the process of genocide has begun in earnest.
The United States alongside the United Kingdom — two sides of the same coin — agreed to this ‘process' at the United Nations in 1947. WWII had only come to an end two years prior. By 1948, the Nakba occurred.
If we take generations to be a sum of decade, then seven and a half generations of Palestinians have survived occupation, exile, partitioning, dispossession, ethnic cleansing — near total extermination.
This means there is not a Palestinian alive who has ever, in their lifetime, experienced a free Palestine. Those who had have already perished and with them, the evidence of proof of existence.
This also means there are also seven and half generations of people globally who have only ever known Palestinian people as an other, as the Enemy, as a group of people set up to be eliminated and exterminated. I am not surprised, then, to see how well the state apparatus has trained us to collude in the eradication of our own species, little by little.
Every generation of my family here in the States has also survived partitioning, ethnic cleansing, dispossession of land and home, forced mass exodus (the Great ‘Migration’ was actually fleeing from state terrorism) erasure of our culture of origin, our mother tongues, our history prior to enslavement, and ongoing attempts at extermination by hands of the state paramilitary—of whom have been trained for over a decade by the state paramilitary of Israel— and by our fellow citizens who deputize themselves to be our executioners.
To say I feel solidarity with Palestinian people is an understatement of all understatements because the boot on their neck is the same as the boot on my neck, and this is what I mean when I say our species cannot survive state control.
Behind this curtain of ongoing death are state heads, acting in concert, who are activating their citizenry to commit murder on their behalf so as to continue to amass power and resource enough to subjugate whom ever they choose next. And this is the problem with state power and the problem with genocide, as hopefully, we are now seeing: someone will always be the enemy, someone will always become the other, someone will always be hunted; there are just so many of us to be exterminated and erased.
We very foolishly though that one genocide might stop all genocides.
Instead, we are seeing that those who have suffered genocide can be very easily swayed to participate in the genocide of others. We are seeing that genocide is simply a tool for amassing power for state heads who deem themselves both law and justice, monarch and deity.
We are seeing justifications made to kill people who simply want their right to exist to be acknowledged and I am so tired of watching us run head first towards our collective destruction.
I don’t know what it means to be human, if all being human means is warring against one another until none of us is left.
I think about people like Octavia Butler and Sun Ra and Sylvia Winters and James Baldwin, Black folks who question what the purpose of being seen as human even really means if, inevitably, you will have to survive dehumanization, if you are not invited into the fold of the human species.
I can’t say they had a solution, but all of these people wondered, seriously, if we cannot be human, if being human isn’t enough, if it’s too reprehensible to stand any longer, then couldn’t we become something else entirely? I hope so. I really do.
I’m with you in this struggle to be human, in this struggle to be alert and present during this state sanctioned/funded genocide against Palestinians. Sending you love and holding you close.