Hello dear ones,
Before we move into this week’s newsletter, I wanted to share a really special opportunity to support folks in Palestine. Elli Zogia/Ez Naive and I have launched a t-shirt collab to fundraise for on the ground support to those in Palestine. All of the proceeds go directly to UNRWA’s UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine. For folks wondering, we really wanted to have this money go directly into GoFundMe’s for families trying to escape, but couldn’t figure a way around biting the cost of taxation. And Print Society, the company we went with, allows you to donate directly to UNRWA.
The t-shirt is $31USD and comes in up to 5XL. Annoyingly this site creates two different links, one for S-2XL and another for 3-5XL. So make sure to click on the link above that applies to you xoxo.
Meeting Each Other Where We’re At
I spent the past five days on vacation with my partner, visiting one of their besties in San Francisco. I promised myself that I would truly treat this like a vacation and not post on Instagram until the day after our return. Despite deleting the app from my home page on my phone, I still found myself logging on, unable to fully disconnect from the world of the internet.
This is how I learned of the Tent Massacre in Rafah that took place on Memorial Day. As I scrolled, I saw numerous references to a photo of a man holding a beheaded baby, and posts decrying this horrific brutality. Alongside these posts were others that said something to the effect of “If it took a beheaded baby to get you to speak up, you better ask yourself why.”
I agree that there is deep and necessary self-inquiry needed here. Why is it that, eight months into a genocide that has been consistently live-streamed, with innumerable horrors and nearly 37K Palestinians killed, people who have been silent are finally speaking up? And why are they doing so with an AI generated image that says “All Eyes on Rafah”?
Before I return to these questions, I want to acknowledge the righteous anger and disbelief present in these questions — especially from those who’re Palestinian, Muslim, and other Black, Indigenous, and POC who have also waited for the collective to care about the violence they experience. Those of us invested in social justice, in the shared humanity of all beings, we can find ourselves haunted by the question Why don’t you care???
When it comes to why it took someone this long, this is a question I cannot answer this myself, and I’m not sure if those who’re being asked could provide an adequate response. What I’ve seen other folks sharing online is everything from they’re afraid of being canceled or they were shamed and guilted into it, to they’ve been too dissociated and frozen to act.
Again, I don’t have the answers here. But there were different concerns that came to mind for me as I watched the responses to the viral “All Eyes on Rafah” photo start to come in, and they were just as varied as folks speculations re: the “Why now?” question. Accounts like landpalestine celebrated the photo reaching 27.2M shares in just 24 hours, while others (sadly I did not save these posts) shared that this felt like a performative gesture, similar to the sharing of black squares in 2020.
Many also wondered why people were sharing an AI generated image as opposed to the images that were being shared from on the ground in Rafah. In my deep dive into many comments sections, the general consensus is that Meta is suppressing and shadow-banning images from Palestine, and so this was the safest way to get past the algorithm and cause the message to be seen and shared by now over 40 million users.
Again, I understand the frustration, and I too felt it when I started to see folks I know share that image. And then I had to check myself. Because the truth is that for many people, this might have been the first time they shared something about Palestine. While I get that for many this feels performative at worst and “too late” at best, I worry that we are pushing people away who could be on our side. (Also, without knowing a human being and what they do off of the internet, how can we ever say for certain that they’re being performative??? This is a question that I ask myself a lot.)
I saw a similar discourse emerge in the wake of the Block Celebrities movement, which is ongoing. As soon as people commented that X celebrity on the list had posted about Palestine, others would comment that it was “too late.” “Where were they 8 months ago???” and declaring that they were doing this to avoid being canceled. At the same time, myself and many others wondered: Well isn’t the point of blocking celebrities precisely to get them to speak up?? If we meet them with suspicion (which, I get, is totally warranted) and say that it’s too late, then we’re losing an opportunity for someone with a massive platform to hopefully change the minds of others who have remained silent or on the side of Zionists.
If you’re a part of leftist activist community, you’ve probably heard someone talk about how the left are so good at eating their own. How do they do this? Through what carla bergman and Nick Montgomery’s refer to as “rigid radicalism” in their book Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times.
There is something that circulates in many radical spaces, movements, and milieus that saps their power from within. It is the pleasure of feeling more radical than others and the worry about not being radical enough; the sad comfort of sorting unfolding events into dead categories; the vigilant perception of errors and complicities in oneself and others; the anxious posturing on social media and the highs of being liked and the lows of being ignored; the suspicion and resentment felt in the presence of something new; the way curiosity feels naïve and condescension feels right.
I’d like to complicate bergman and Montgomery’s definition here, because I don’t think that folks who participate in rigid radicalism necessarily feel pleasure at naming actions or behaviors that feel performative to them, nor do they believe that they are being condescending or that “condescension feels right.” I believe that in a lot of cases, activists are exhausted, enraged, and grieving. That they are frustrated because they want so much more from others — a desire that I understand.
I also worry about how, in criticizing those who’re just now speaking up, in refusing to meet them where they’re at, we alienate one another and lose sight of the real enemy. Staci K Haines shares a similar concern in her book The Politics of Trauma:
One of the challenges we face as we work together is that building justice is complex and nuanced while white supremacy culture likes to pretend we can reduce everything to a simple either/or. So we are called to navigate the complexity of our conditioning without losing sight of the inherent humanity in each of us … I will say that white supremacy wants us to attack each other as the problem. As we fight with and among each other, we fail to identify the actual problem.
It’s not everyone’s role in the revolution to meet people where they’re at. But I do feel like that is one part of the work that I’m called to do. There are so many reasons why one might be speaking up now, and I want them to continue to use their voice, even if it begins by sharing an AI generated story slide.
Of course, I want them to also do more, like share calls to action, attend a protest, write to their reps, have hard convos with family and loved ones. It can be all too easy to say that these actions aren’t asking a lot when you’ve been in the activism world for more than a minute. And yet, as someone who struggles to executive function when it comes to doing a new scary thing, I want to hold space for how immobilizing it can be to step out of your comfort zone for the first time. Does everyone else in the movement need to hold this space? No. But some of us, especially white folks, really need to.
I’m sure that what I’ve shared here will cause some disagreement, and I just want to name that I am so open to having those conversations. I just hope that we can do so while acknowledging everyone’s humanity. I certainly have so much to learn and will never reach some phase of PerfectActivist™ because such a thing doesn’t exist.
I guess what I’m saying is that I want there to be space for people to step into activism imperfectly. I want space for all of us to be imperfect. I want space for disagreement without canceling each other. I want space for seeing that one person’s performative gesture might be another person’s gateway into a radical way of being in the world. Because we need all of us imperfect beings to build the world that we dream of.
Culture Diary
I just spent 4 days in San Francisco and did some serious book shopping while I was there. Fun fact: as someone with a million books in my “to read” stacks, I’ve created a rule for buying more books while traveling: it needs to be a book that I haven’t seen / or heard of before. As someone who is pretty on the pulse when it comes to books, I get so much joy when I discover a book that I didn’t know about. So for this week’s Culture Diary, it’s an all books edition!
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Bad Girls by Camila Sosa Villada: I picked up this book in Dog Earred Books because of the beautiful cover and the title and was sold when the bookstore employee referred to it as “gutting.” Set in Argentina, this is a trans coming of age story with some elements of autofiction and magic realism and it was, indeed, gutting.
The Story Game by Shze-Hui Tjoa: Another Dog Earred books find blurbed by one of my fav nonfiction writers T Kira Madden, which was all that I needed to pick it up. What made me buy it is the movement from chapters where there is a dialogue between the author’s adult self and child self, and the author’s attempts at recovering memories lost to CPTSD.
Ponyboy by Eliot Duncan: TBH, I’m kinda over the queer genre of party girl/boy/boi/them as someone who’s almost 40 and did all that in my teens. But I grabbed Ponyboy from Walden Pond Books because I love a queer/trans coming of age book and the words “the terror, eroticism, and bright urgency of coming home to yourself.”
Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir by Zoë Bossiere: I am kinda having a LOL moment right now because this is. yet another queer/trans coming of age book. Is it clear that I’m also kinda working on my own story in this genre?!? Any book blurbed by Melissa Febos is a must read for me — especially as someone who also grew up working class poor and struggled with substance abuse. Also anything described as “equal parts harsh and tender” is basically my genre.
A Grotesque Animal by Amy Lee Lillard: I found this book in the nonfiction section at City Lights Bookstore while my partner patiently sat reading behind me. “At the age of forty-three, Amy Lee Lillard learned she was autistic…part of a community of unseen women who fell through the cracks due to medical bias and social stereotypes.” I showed the book to my partner, who is autistic, and we decided to grab it to share. Also, I love a memoir with cultural analysis.
Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History by Margaret Juhae Lee: Technically my partner bought this one, but it’s another book that we’ll be sharing. This book combines investigative journalism, oral history, and archival research, to tell the story of Margaret’s grandfather, a student revolutionary, and family trauma.
And just for fun, here I am at three different SF bookstores!
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I totally agree. I wondered “why now?” as well AND I don’t believe shaming is sustainable. Also I love the memoir recs!
Lots of food for thought here! Just found you and this article after seeing you referenced on decolonizemyself IG.
I took suffer from executive dysfunction and I've been completely burned out and physically sick for months. I keep going, thought I feel like I've hit a point where I did everything I could with "friends" and family. I appreciate those who did little only recently and didn't speak out when I did, and I'm willing to gently point them to crucial info like BIPOC-written resources, but I'm starting to accept that there will be those who will never speak up.
In that category I even have former friends who, many years ago when I went to uni, were my gateway into leftist thought. People who were the first to hand me Chomsky and talk of things like direct democracy. People who were the first to tell me of apartheid walls in Palestine. How they're silent now and how they've abandoned their activism is something I'll never digest. But there's no time for despair over what was lost when there was so much gained. There's a new community to build and I'm committed to it. I feel safe in a community probably for the first time in my life.
Thank you for the lovely writing!