That one time y'all had me fucked up: dispatches from quarantine, #1
Are you still the radical minded twelve year old you used to be?
I had many dreams as a child.
You know the sort of kid I’m talking about: one day a doctor, the next a teacher. Actually, for me, I rotated between being a pastry chef, an archaeologist, or a radical — A Panther, to be exact.
I grew up in a funny household; on the one hand, my immigrant side drank the colonialist, assimilationist Kool-aid. On the other hand, I was lucky to be raised in what I now know as the Black radical tradition. My father’s people, having escaped the violent social contract we know as Jim Crow, migrated across the United States. With this movement of bodies, my kin settled as far as Olympia, Washington and Salt Lake City, Utah. They also made homes in Chicago, Illinois — one of the many birthplaces of Black radical thinking. An aunt on that side was a Panther, another a member of (the problematic as fuck, cultish) Nation of Islam. What I’m getting at is, unlike my Afro-Carribean kin, these negroes knew how to think for themselves and as such, I am here today.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve begun to deeply examine what it means to make choices, especially as it regards to how those choices affect those around me. This has helped to shape not only my sense of accountability, but it’s also allowed me to examine the accountability or, in most cases, severe lack of accountability of other adults around me. Personal example: after disclosing that my mother had enacted extreme control and abuse over for the entirety of my life to my father, I stopped speaking to him for over two years because he would not take accountability for the decisions he made over my lifetime that continually put me in harm’s way. I mourned the loss of that relationship silently for years. My father was my first best friend. How could he, a thinking negro, deny me my pain and suffering? How could he not see the evidence in front of him? How could he make the decision to choose a life of emotional abuse after years of depression, isolation, and misery?
I made the decision I wasn’t about to find out the answers to those questions. It wasn’t my work to do so I decided, simply, not to do his work for him.
He had taught me that but the values he instilled in me, that I had grown to admire due to his upkeep of those values over his lifetime, had suddenly become unimportant in that moment of decision-making. I had to make peace with that and in making peace with that, I also had to keep it moving.
I was seeking a radical, new way of being in a relationship with him and I knew it wasn’t enough to go back to “normal”, especially if violence and abuse from a personality disordered parent was a significant part of that normal. I walked away toward liberation and never turned back to look to normalcy.
Bernie Sanders has been an interesting figure to me for some time.
Specifically, he might be the only gray-haired life long white radical I’ve seen in my lifetime. Them shits do not grow on trees the way you think they’d ought to. The decision he made in his youth to become an agitator resonates with me deeply. That he is a white man, in his seventies, who still is an agitator says something powerful to me: here is a person who understands that the decisions you make, throughout time, over and over again, define your value system and how you will walk around in the world for the rest of your life.
Because I know this and because my family’s history bound up in the cruel history of the United States, I find him to be singularly impressive in this feat. If you haven’t been paying attention, the entirety of the country is at a standstill, not just because of a pandemic but primarily, because of the decisions that were made, constantly, prior to the pandemic. First, there was the decision to hire a racist, xenophobic autocrat fat cat thief to run the country because it really chapped some asses that a mixed-race dude from Hawai’i “ran the country into the ground” for eight years. Then, there was the period in time when said fat cat decided to toss vulnerable brown kids in cages but actually wait, let me pull back a little bit...
First, there was the decision to allow children to be murdered at school by “radicalized” white men. Then there was the decision to allow police officers to murder Black children with impunity whenever they pleased for our viewing pleasure on our new, portable idiot boxes. Ah fuck, nope, that wasn’t the start. First, there was the social contract enacted by white people to establish a form a violent de jure racism weaponized pogroms (‘softened', if you will, as riots so the accountability of impending violence was ’shared’ so to speak with their targets) and mobs that caused a mass migration of Americans across the country, as refugees seeking shelter and safety from violent mobs, but then we said they were looking for jobs and opportunity, glossing over the homegrown terrorism that had driven them en mass to escape the South so as not to be held accountable for our decisions, even now. Even today.
Right now, our country is being held together by a flimsy set of social contracts: wash your hands (for twenty seconds, you bare idiots!) and stay inside to prevent illness in those around you. If you’ve seen the news, you see we Americans aren’t good with social contracts unless that contract means enacting violence and terror upon those the ruling racial class has deemed as unworthy.
I’ve spent over thirty hours in the airport today alone, returning from a trip to Southeast Asia.
I was in Vietnam where there were only 61 cases of Coronavirus and it was mandated that all foreigners wear masks in order to reduce infection in the country, and yet: Many of you still aren’t washing your hands, ignoring mandates to wear masks because you’re in a ‘foreign’ country as if that means something to anyone, meeting up in huge groups because y’alls I do what I want you can’t make me do otherwise toddler asses can’t be told a single, goddamned thing.
I left on March 4th and returned to this dystopia thirteen days later.
We keep making the decision to kill one another easily. It’s the same decision the ruling racial class has made over four centuries now, and as you go, so does the rest of the country, sadly. We’re going nowhere really fucking fast.
Mr. Sanders hung out around thinking negroes and it shows in his decision making. Your parents didn’t hang around negroes, let alone thinking ones and it shows in their decision making and YOURS. Instead, they were pelting people with rocks and blowing up church buildings as part of their social contract to each other and to whiteness in much the same way you won’t wash your hands or respect the fact that now is not the fucking time to be pulling the American Individualist card right now.
Mr. Biden, to my knowledge, did fuckall during the civil rights movement. It shows in his decision making: he threw a Black woman under the bus so a Black assimilationist predator could sit on the Supreme Court after referring to his being made to be accountable for his decision to assault a woman a ‘high tech lynching’ (the motherfucker) He called our first Black(-ish) president, his commander-in-chief, ‘bright, clean, and articulate’.
I don’t think it’s that people don’t recognize the ‘exceptional’ American system for the exceptional bullshit that it is. I don’t think Americans don’t want a Universal Basic Income or Universal health care or any manner of a social contract that provides us with a healthy basis of living and thriving. I do think that the individual American’s value system is dictated by the decisions they make or don’t make, and furthermore, they choose a leader who most closely makes the sorts of decisions they would make (or in Obama’s case, represents an idealized version of the decision they think they are making). Biden has always chosen the path of least resistance. American’s love nothing more than to make the decision that everyone else is making. How the fuck else do you explain 43% of white women pledging their vote to a known sexual predator?
Bernie’s decision making for his lifetime has diametrically stood in opposition to all the social contracts dictated in every moment in American decision making. The dissident is met with contempt and the fear of accountability. That’s what makes him a radical in the eyes of your bandwagoning family members. They aren’t thinking negroes so don’t expect them to start thinking about anything now. It’s too late.
===
Part of the reason I wanted to be a Panther was that I felt aligned with their decision making, even at twelve. Why not feed hungry kids breakfast so they can do better in class while at school? Why not provide groceries to families struggling in poverty? Who wouldn’t arm themselves in the face of constant violence? Why not be proud of the enduring strength that Blackness in American represents?
Of course, at the time, it also felt very sexy and subversive of me to be interested in what was incorrectly labeled as a terrorist organization. In America, ‘terrorism’ is ANY form a dissidence that challenges the current social contracts. This is why radicalized white men are not called terrorists — they are upholding the social contracts set in place by way of violence.
Really, I was a kid who lived in a constant threat of violence, who deeply understood that we are the sum of the decisions we make. I decided, in the face of familial terror, to read books and learn, to think for myself apart from what my personal dictator was gaslighting me into thinking, to question authority because the person with the most authority over me was constantly abusing that power bestowed to her. In that way, my mother is the reason I am diametrically opposed to authority. In making the decision to estrange myself from her abuse, I also made the decision to estrange myself from ANY forms of abuse, in ALL aspects of my life.
You can try it with me if you want to, but as some of you are coming to notice, I’m really with the shits. It’s part of my value system, formed over a series of decisions I’ve made to liberate myself from social contracts that seek to exploit, harm, demean, and diminish me. If I won’t allow the person who carried me in her body, who then expelled me into this world, to abuse me, do you really think I’m going to let you or anyone else get away with that kind of shit?
You see, it turns out, I became a Panther in my own right. Not by affiliation, but by careful decision making. What I believed at twelve, I believe now at thirty-two, which is sort of how it all works. Woke-adjacency doesn’t change your values or your decision making, but what you were told to believe, which ultimately dictates the sorts of decisions you make throughout your life, does shape your values. Since I was twelve I believed that no human being should ever have to suffer abuse or be made to be systemically targeted for any reason. I vowed after reading Hiroshima and The Diary of Anne Frank to never be the sort of person who would go along with the given social contract of the day, especially if that contract involved dehumanizing any member of society.
TO THIS DAY, I still believe that shit.
To this day, Bernie still believes it is in our country’s best interests to fight against the social contracts of racism, xenophobia, and queerphobia (the trifecta from which all other isms and social ails take root. Where you find a racist, you’ll be sure to find a queer-bashing, women-hating, foreigner-fearing, ableist, bare dickhead.) so we can all live in a liberated world.
Normal ended a very long time ago. Normal ain’t coming back, so get used to it, because this country’s idea of normal has always included inequality, violence, war, poverty, and instability. If you think that’s normal, you really need to take this quarantine time to reflect on the series of decisions you’ve made over time that shape this idea of normal as values you uphold and want to see continue on.
Change has come for all of us, now, and liberation can follow. Who did you used to dream about being when you were a child? Are you that person now? Have your decision reflected a value system that maintains human life is precious and must be protected or do your decisions reflect a value system that allows you to continue to put everyone around you in harm’s way while not taking responsibility for your actions?
Does accountability make you feel uncomfortable?
Are you thinking or not?
Better do it now before it’s too late…actually, it's far too late now. You’ve made your decisions, your values are set. Do they serve you exclusively or do they serve the common good?
For those of us who been about that life, this is my call to action to you. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for and we are lucky to have some good blueprints. Below are two very important lists of demands for our current state of emergency. In order to survive this pandemic, we are going to need to set in place a value system that will change our current social contract to that of one dictated by liberation and a secure life for all Americans, including the dummies who got us here in the first place.
WHAT WE WANT - TEN POINT PLATFORM, 1966
We want freedom. We want the power to determine the destiny of our Black community.
We want full employment for our people.
We want an end to the robbery by the capitalist of our Black community.
We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in present-day society.
We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.
We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of Black people.
We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county, and city prisons and jails.
We wall Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black communities, as defined by the constitution of the United States.
We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace.
POOR PEOPLE’S CAMPAIGN, BILL OF ECONOMIC & SOCIAL RIGHTS, 1968
The right of every employable citizen to a decent job.
The right of every citizen to a minimum income.
The right of a decent house and the free choice of neighborhood.
The right to an adequate education.
The right to participate in the decision-making process.
The right to the full benefit of modern science in health care.
I believe now is the time we can make the Panther’s Ten Points come to life just as I believe we can advocate for universal basic income, free healthcare and an end houselessness for all using the work of Martin Luther King's Poor People's Campaign, so here’s what we’re gonna do:
Call your representative and ask them to institute a rent freeze immediately. We don’t have to worry about eviction sweeps if we can ensure none of us has to pay rent to keep a roof over our heads, so don’t even bother with the eviction shit. It doesn’t matter if you are able to pay your rent for the foreseeable because many of us cannot. It doesn’t matter if you have a mortgage. You shouldn’t have to pay for housing in the middle of a global pandemic and what is going to become the second most crippling recession our generation has had to face.
20% of us are going to be out of work for at least eighteen months — it’s coming for EVERYONE. If we agitate now, we can start to demand this system be kept in place even outside of a state of emergency.
Don’t let people fuck with your money right now. This might be the height of class consciousness in this country so don’t let anyone use money (or the impending lack thereof) as a tool to orient you towards the ruling racial class’ current wack-ass social contract. If you’re a person who has control over people due to money, I’d suggest you think carefully about how you use the power of money to control or subdue people around you. Folks are existentially angry right now, and rightfully so, don’t start no shit won’t be no shit. You’re welcome.
Share the Panther ten-point platform and the Poor People’s Campaign Bill of Social and Economic with your friends and discuss the series of decisions you can make now to align your values to this radical system of upholding humanity. Take it a step further and share this with your representatives locally and federally. A lot of people sacrificed their lives to leave these blueprints behind for us. We have the opportunity to make them reality now. Let us honor our ancestors by seeing to it these platforms are in front of the faces of our leaders and government representatives. Now is the time to be bold — it’s what survival requires of us, boldness.
Biden is likely to become the Democratic nominee. Let’s force him as left as we possibly can. The Dems know what’s at stake right now and they will be forced to move in OUR direction if we start holding those mfers accountable right the fuck now.
Take social distancing and public hygiene seriously. I’m not kidding.
We are living in a moment in time where you could accidentally kill someone and I’m not sure that’s the sort of weight any of us wants on our conscious right now so keep your ass at home, stop panic hoarding, and read some books. Now is the time to sharpen your critical thinking skills. Hell, your thinking skills in general. It’s not enough thinking negroes out here right and we need a massive brain trust to get us through the next few weeks let alone the remainder of the year.
Trust your inner child, they are your best moral compass. Ask them if you’ve been making decisions up until this point that aligns with their value system. If the answer is no, make it a priority to journal and LISTEN to your child self. We need the knowledge of your purest, most humanity oriented self right now. In the words of Mr. Rogers, I like you as you are. Exactly and precisely. I think you turned out nicely. And I like the way you are.
Take care of yourself, knowing that by doing so you are taking care of all of us. Get sleep, eat nourishing food, talk kindly to and about yourself, know you are needed, and valuable because you are a child of the Universe. If you can do this for you, then you will create for yourself a value system in which you will always put the best interests of humanity first.
I believe we will get through this, together. I believe in your highest self and your orientation towards a humane society. I believe you want this just as badly as I do. And I believe you will use this time wisely to do your part to see about the creation of a newly liberated world.
I love you.