Delete Later
Bombing, Nuremberg', Saul Steinberg (1945). © The Saul Steinberg Foundation Via Bonart.cat
I do not grieve Kamala Harris’ presidential loss, but I hold sadness for another Trump presidency. The current political atmosphere is a troubling blend of uncertainties and certainties. The impact of the infamous Project 2025 and the callousness reminiscent of his first presidential term are a given; however, how the breadth of this white supremacist programming will be carried out over the next four years—and on—remains unclear.
Nevertheless, The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—a lazy replica of past white supremacist undertakings—has been here before: Project 1776, 1793, 1808, 1825, 1830, 1838, 1845, 1850, 1854, 1857, 1863, 1865, 1877, 1883, 1887, 1890, 1896, 1898, 1903, 1910, 1915, 1924… 2016, 2020*... and so on and so forth.
Activists and organizers in the southern US warned us about current iterations of Project 2025. They pointed to aggressive and violent Democratic politician-led responses to the campaigns to “Stop Cop City” in Atlanta, Georgia (or in Baltimore, Maryland), post-Roe state infringement on reproductive rights that required federal intervention or an executive order, and the recent Biden/Harris administration’s nonchalant “FEMA ain’t got it” response to hurricanes in the US southern belt. Political analysts and historians have also highlighted the demobilization of progressive activist movements and the normalcy of Democratic Party-stylized “diet fascism.” This shift has pushed American politics further to the right at a time when the public is begging for a New Deal 2024 and deterrence from the Biden/Harris administration’s streamlined proxy wars and genocides.
Take the Gems And Leave the Mess
I was never excited or joyful about the possibility of a Harris administration. Kamala Harris is bossed and bought—the opposite of Shirley Chisholm. I spent my formative years watching the Kamala Harrises of the world silence and traumatize Black girls, femmes, and women like me—unambiguously Black, dark-skinned, working class/poor, always asking too many questions. The Kamala Harrises of the world use the politics of desirability, celebrity, and internalized anti-Blackness to silence us and then extract our trauma as kindling to support their rise.
At the end of the day, these Harrises and the political class they represent have always abandoned me and mines, leaving us for dead in sacrificial zones. We are hardwired to position desirability politics over reality—Harris is rich, powerful, racially ambiguous, and multiracial, a politician, a "top cop," Upper Middle Class, married to a white man (social capital), and openly Zionist. Kamala Harris’ investment in white supremacy and allegiance to the empire casts her as an active participant in the system. Let's not be delusional.
Harris reminded me of my youth working in Martha’s Vineyard in the trenches of “Black Excellence,” colorist and texturist anti-Blackness, and Black Middle Class-styled American exceptionalism. My time there was oxymoronic, uncomfortable, and revealing—with “good” memories layered with inconsistencies, power games, and pain. I remember mundane and extraordinary days during my teenage years on porches conversing with Angela Y. Davis and even an encounter with Kathleen Cleaver, both guests at the home I stayed at. I remember listening to conversations of Black radicals and former Black Panthers about the Inkwell and August Lantern festival and chiming in, if appropriate, between working double shifts and multiple jobs on the island in the summers.
Seeing the Black radicals of yesteryears layered within the ecosystems of Black liberals, Black celebrities, and Black capitalists was an interesting experience. These complexities were exposed with Davis’ recent endorsement of Harris at the sheer disappointment of her Black decolonial feminist and Black leftist supporters. I do not hold any animosity about the choices one personally made this election cycle, but I also was not surprised by this endorsement—which differs from a personal and private vote. Take the gems and leave the mess.
The experiences of Martha’s Vineyard were intermixed with brutal racism, classism, and Zionism living in a majority white-Jewish town in Massachusetts, where my mom was often asked, “What family do you work for?” and the police came to our residence too often, responding to calls from racist neighbors. The first time the police arrived was when I was five years old; my sisters and I were playing on our stoop within the first month we moved to the town.
The racism we faced was counteracted by anti-Zionist Jewish connections. At the age of 14, I did not fully understand what the Jewish people in my core-community meant when they said, “We don’t support the state of Israel.” However, I did understand that they supported me (my existence in a brutally racist town), and “I” was a part of the “we.” Just as I was exposed to the “Diaspora Wars” and the politics of the “Black Middle Class” within the context of Black America, I have always understood Zionist ideology holding a space of deep chasms and conflict amongst Jewish American communities. These chasms have been exposed to many for the first time through the genocide in Gaza, the history of Israel's occupation of Palestine, and the blatant anti-semitism experience by pro-Palestinian Jewish activists by pro-Israel contingents and the state.
Anti-Palestinian discrimination has been layered within Islamophobia and Anti-Arab rhetoric and propaganda to support Israel and Zionist political ideology. Harkening to the Bush/Cheney era “War on Terror,” Palestinian and SWANA community members have experienced increased violence and surveillance. The attempts to erase Palestinian history, people, and pain are very much an American project. US-Israeli war crimes are jarring and frightening.
Almost eighty years of Israeli occupation and apartheid of Palestine give us a view of the present existence and future technological developments of United States fascism. Just as the Biden administration's premature ending of the COVID-19 pandemic desensitized Americans to mass death, Israel’s genocide in Gaza—with the indiscriminate bombing; targeting of designated safe zones, hospitals and humanitarian aid routes; and targeting of families (children!), journalists, health workers, UN workers, and aid workers—demonstrate transition to an overtly heinous standard for war and flagrant live-streamed war crimes. This standard already existed with US genocides in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as documented torture at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and Abu Ghraib prison. However, well-evidenced Israel and US war crimes are coupled with arrogant threats to the United Nations and the International Criminal Court.
Islamophobia and anti-Black iterations of Orientalism are rooted in the colonial history of the United States and the Western hemisphere. Many indigenous Africans human trafficked across the Atlantic were Muslim or held Islamic cultural practices. Scholars note the importance of Islam in the resistance of the enslaved in Haiti, Cuba, and Brazil.
In the modern history of resistance, Palestine will always be THAT liberation movement—in line with Angola, South Africa, Algeria, and even Attica Prison—central to Black radical/anti-fascist politics of Franz Fanon, Claudia Jones, Malcolm X, Walter Rodney, Kwame Ture, the Black Panther Party, Nelson and Winnie Mandela, and Assata Shakur. The Palestinian movement has also always exposed global realities and internal conflicts, particularly around the existence of Black Arabs and anti-Blackness in Arab communities, with a readiness to engage and repair. This is how I have experienced my solidarity and connection to the movement.
“30 Minutes” Campaign
Speaking within the world of Black America, Black progressives and decolonial activists knew Harris would only win with an authentic appeal to progressive organizers, the working class, progressive voting members of diverse multi-status immigrant families, and the youth…