The morning after Trump was elected for the first time, Quaker elders, radical Black youth, anarchists, parents and toddlers circled around my woodstove to continue planning our solidarity action against the Dakota Access Pipeline. We passed my six-week old baby around and talked about the election, about Standing Rock, about future plans and possibilities. A rally had been hastily called in the center of the small Appalachian college town nearby, and that evening we marched in the streets with hundreds of people, shouting NO TRUMP/NO KKK/NO FASCIST USA.
This November, things were different. On election day, several friends were serving a month in jail for shutting down a Boeing facility in opposition to the Gazan genocide. In February, I’ll be facing a felony trial for resisting the Mountain Valley Pipeline in my region, along with eleven co-defendants. The anniversary of the criminal police murder of Tortuguita Manuel Téran is January 18th, and Atlanta land defenders are still facing absurd domestic terrorism charges. A friend who is more like family fled the state this fall after their child was refused gender affirming care, abruptly leaving their job, school, and beloved community. My kids are older now. They ask me if we ever win. In town, the night after the election, there was no big march. This time, the streets were quiet.
When, within days, I was invited to facilitate a direct-action training, I nearly said no. Those of us invited to lead trainings, speak in front of groups, or write pieces like this one need to stay humble, to resist anything that reeks of protest-as-usual, soothing political egos, ideology, or false guarantees. My friend Romy Felder, a trans anti-authoritarian theology PhD candidate writes, “Reject Optimism. It’s OK that there is no hope for things to continue as they are. Optimism is a false sense of safety, a confidence that we can eventually rename the terrors we have wrought upon the world.” We are frequently being outmaneuvered, crushed, or ignored. It makes sense to grieve, to be discouraged or uncertain. Now is a time of necessary reassessment.
For Democrats, that reassessment veers towards capitulation. They study the Republican party for tips. They bemoan losing the (white) working class. Apparently “woke” lost them the election. Of course, the fetishization of the working class, pairing populist or even a few socialist ideas with exclusion and hyper-nationalism is not new and it’s not interesting. In fact, it’s party-line fascist as far back as Mussolini and Mosley. But why bother being a student of history when you could cynically pander for votes?
What will big issues look like in practical terms where you live? How can you find out? What can you do about it?
The term’s misappropriation notwithstanding, “woke” at this point is most often used to mean condescending, sanctimonious, purist, rhetorical, or politically trendy. “Reject Cynicism,” writes Felder. “Take back tradition, the wisdom of our ancestors, their hopes and fears and struggles.” In other words, don’t be fooled.
There’s nothing condescending about defending migrants. There’s nothing sanctimonious about insisting on civil rights for transgender people nor about fighting for racial justice. There’s nothing rhetorical about protecting abortion, opposing genocide, or about battling the death cult of the fossil fuel industry. These fights are not politically trendy. They are continuations of our histories and traditions, as human and fundamental as housing, healthcare, and food on the table. They require real work in real time. They require alliance, risk, and full participation.
But I’m not a Democrat, never have been, no matter how many fundraising texts they send me. What of my own reassessment?
I attend the memorial service of a mentor of mine, Teresa Mills. An Appalachian elder with a high school education, Teresa liked to call herself “the housewife from hell.” She fought fiercely for rural and low-income people to have their rights to air and water protected over industrial profits. In a light-filled pavilion at a public park, we share stories of Teresa building relationship after relationship, of lovingly pushing each one of us to find our own place in the work.
I convene a weekly dinner for friends and neighbors.
I volunteer with Food Not Bombs.
I write to a friend in prison.
I join a choir.
I listen to a ballad about the Battle of Cable Street, when in 1936, Irish Catholic dockworkers and Jewish textile workers (and many others) kicked the British Union of Fascists out of London’s East End. They were able to do it because they knew each other. They’d fought together for fair labor conditions, and their children had been raised side by side, often in each other’s houses. With my own children, I learn all the words. No Pasaran, we sing.
It must be a basic commitment that fascists and white nationalists are never allowed to show their faces in public unopposed.
At the last minute, I agree to the direct-action training. My co-trainers and I plan to offer tools for building trust, for collective decision making and action values. I remember that humility means participation. I remember that direct action is rooted not in a well-worn set of protest tactics, not in any guarantees, but in a way of living. This way of living challenges me to be creative, honest, and practical. To have a long and deep memory. To bypass formulas and to embrace my responsibilities. To remember that in the absence of known outcomes, I have known values. To do my part to resist the totalizing pull of power and domination.
“You do not vote fascism away,” the Black anarchist thinker William C. Anderson reminds us. As Democrats scramble to recover representative democracy no matter the cost, he suggests that we “who are not clowns” can deepen our understanding of direct democracy, can undertake what he calls survival work. What we face is overwhelming.
Mass deportation, loss of healthcare, loss of housing, loss of civil and reproductive rights, rising climate chaos. Scale down. Talk with friends. Not over digital platforms, but face to face. What will big issues look like in practical terms where you live? How can you find out? What can you do about it?
There will still be time for marching in the streets. Not to appeal to the cold shoulder of state and corporate power, but in the practical antifascist tradition of “we go where they go.” In the state I live in, hate groups have only increased their bullying of migrants, queer people, and others. It must be a basic commitment that fascists and white nationalists are never allowed to show their faces in public unopposed.
As for condescending, sanctimonious, purist, rhetorical, or politically trendy, I invite those of us getting lost in the overuse of such words as harm, safety, violence, care, trauma, privilege, allyship (and more) to imagine those words when re-infused with meaning, to measure them against the magnitude of our struggles, which outlive current political fashions. When we use the language of social justice to identify and target power, rather than to compete, grandstand, divide, and self-justify, paths of action come clear.
Felder entreats us to reject both optimism and cynicism. What comes next? “Embrace reality as it is,” she writes. “Embrace action and practice. Embrace the possibilities in everyday life. Embrace mystery, learning, and the brutality of the truth.” In times of authoritarianism, we want to say we did what we could. Let’s gather with the people we trust and the resources we have and get started.
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Featured image: Dakota Access Pipeline Native American protest site, on Highway 1806 near Cannonball, North Dakota, August 15th, 2016. Courtesy.
