Like much of the world, I’ve been witnessing the United States combust over this past week. Many of us are still stuck at home and glued to our screens, searching for some kind of sense and stability in our new world order. What we’re seeing instead is the pointy end of the old world order collapsing.
I’ve been watching in horror as black people and their allies take to the streets to plead with authorities to stop killing them, only to have the police and the army from their own country turned on them by a dictator.
At the time I wrote about Trump’s election, I was also having lots of wide ranging / soul searching discussions with friends. I thought that he was the perfect figurehead to accelerate the collapse of the American Dream - the utter lie that if you keep your head down and work hard you’ll get ahead. Who better to shatter the illusion than a man who cultivated a bullshit reputation off a racist business model built on daddy’s money and absolutely no morals or intelligence.
I didn’t expect though that it would happen so quickly, and so visibly - complete with an uprising from those people the American project first imported as chattel, then systematically kept enslaved, depressed and marginalised - for profit - for hundreds of years. And I didn’t expect that this would happen while he turned off the lights and cowered in a bunker like the man-child he is, protected by all of the illegitimate pomp and circumstance the White House embodies - built on stolen land by stolen people.
The USA is more than just a canary in the coal mine - it is also a symbol and actual reality of corruption, entrenched inequality, and unfettered capitalism - and it is breaking open.
Russell Brand shared this week an extract from his conversation with academic Kehinde Andrews, Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University in the UK (below). They discuss the roots of racism - and the fact that these are intrinsically embedded in our shared history - and present day. This horrific recent record of deaths in custody is just the latest chapter in the centuries of devastation wrought on communities of colour over hundreds of year of imperial / colonial / capitalist rule.
And don’t think for a second that we are exempt from this. Our own horrific history mirrors that of almost every other country founded on colonialism > theft, dispossession, disenfranchisement, segregation and decades of entrenched systematic institutionalised racism. As has been well documented (but only really “heard” this week) there have been 432 deaths of aboriginal people in custody since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991. There has been no acknowledgement of unceded sovereignty, no aboriginal voice to parliament, no real effort at reconciliation, no reparations to the people our ancestors stole this land from. And yet we wring our hands and pretend to wonder why we’re not closing the gap.
At the end of April, Gabrielle Hamilton - proprietor and chef of an eatery called Prune in New York’s East Village, wrote a piece for the New York Times about watching her beloved business of 20 years collapsing in the face of the COVID closedown. She talks in detail about the years working 7 days, adding extra shifts, of scrimping and saving, and doing her own deep cleaning of the venue so that she could keep things afloat. She also confesses that she, like so many in the industry have been fooling others about just how well (or badly) their businesses were faring - that they’ve been barely keeping up appearances, just pretending.
You asked, “How’s business?” and the answer always was, “Yeah, great, best quarter we’ve ever had.” But then the coronavirus hits, and these same restaurant owners rush into the public square yelling: “Fire! Fire!” They now reveal that they had also been operating under razor-thin margins. It instantly turns 180 degrees: Even famous, successful chefs, owners of empires, those with supremely wealthy investors upon whom you imagine they could call for capital should they need it, now openly describe in technical detail, with explicit data, how dire a position they are in. The sad testimony gushes out, confirming everything that used to be so convincingly denied.
She’s talking about restaurants when she says “the coronavirus did not suddenly shine light on an unknown fragility. We’ve all known, and for a rather long time.” But she could be talking about all of it.
If, like me, and like Hamilton, you are a white person in the developed world, you have won the life lottery when it comes to privilege. This privilege has diverted any pressure we might otherwise have felt as a result of this corrupt system to people lower on the imaginary totem pole - people in the developing world, people of colour, people of minority gender, sexuality, religious and ability. We benefit from their disadvantage.
This is what it feels like for many of us who are at the privileged end of the scale when the system tightens in on itself. How we define struggling is a very wide spectrum framed by what level of privilege or disadvantage we experience. Her experience is the tip of the iceberg. As a relatively privileged white person, she’s only experiencing a tiny fraction of what minority communities have known to be true for eons - the American Dream is bullshit. For black people it isn’t about being unable to afford to work hard and be your own boss like it is for Hamilton - it is about being able to assume that you won’t be the latest victim of state endorsed murder when you duck out to get some cigarettes like George Floyd.
We’re finally seeing it - but only now that the last bit of wealth has been extracted and wrung out of those minorities for the benefit of the rentier class has it really started impacting us. The warning bells rang when the the frustration felt by the poorer white formerly working- and middle- classes started crying out in the form of Brexit, Trump and a wave of right wing / white supremacist support throughout Europe. And apparently that’s where we’re up to.
An uprising among the black community, a new frustration among disaffected whites, ever increasing diseases of despair, and climate change are all symptoms of the same illness, and maybe that’s what’s actually hitting home for once.
My hopeful theory is that the pause brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the status quo just enough that those of us who are typically protected from any kind of disadvantage have experienced just a little bit of discomfort - enough to to realise that unemployment that is no fault of our own is real. It has meant that those who would never normally have to experience a feeling that things are out of our control have had just a taste of what it might be like to be a member of a minority or disadvantaged group. Maybe enough of us have seen the whole sham of it, and shattered the illusion that working hard and building yourself up from nothing is possible. We’ve learned in real time that there are external forces at play bringing you two steps back for every step forward.
At the same time, it has given us an external factor to point to that allows us to admit that so many of us are struggling. It has let us drop the facade. What has followed is a collective realisation and a sense of relief that we don’t have to hold ourselves solely responsible for our successes or failures. Iso-life has forcibly reminded us how interconnected we all are.
And the huge scale of these protests has reinforced the devastation of living at the extreme end of the disadvantage continuum - the alarming number of deaths in custody being experienced by people of colour (the most marginalised) in the US of A (the most extreme manifestation of the neoliberal ideal).
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The stoics called a feeling of connection to the whole sympatheia. Marcus Aurelius articulates it as “That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.” Dr Martin Luther King Jr knew it too, when he wrote a letter responding to critique from his fellow clergymen while imprisoned in a jail in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. (Read the whole thing at the link.) The letter includes the seminal quote:
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
Maybe a global pandemic and white people experiencing a little bit of instability is what we’ve needed for a sort of consensus to form that actually, things aren’t working - the balance sheet of the global economy just doesn’t add up - and that this is a feature not a flaw of the system. All of a sudden, we’ve seen a shift in orthodoxy around whether the global economy that governs us is really the best we can do. The evidence is pointing to the fact that the economy isn’t providing for the wellbeing of a large number of its participants, let alone the environment that supports us all. A stack of institutions, including the Australian Reserve Bank, have been sounding the alarm for some time now that the whole thing is built on too much debt, unsustainable and vulnerable to a shock - which has arrived right on schedule.
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Communities of colour have been dealing with this shit for centuries - they’ve been bought and sold, marginalised, and killed. They’re can’t just ignore it and get on with things when they’re being killed at an alarming rate just for existing. They know that if you happen to “make it” it is sheer luck - and that it could all come crashing down thanks to one traffic stop or stop-and-frisk. That like George Floyd, you could do absolutely nothing wrong and be killed by those who are supposedly there to protect and serve.
This system has allowed the developed world (and within that a very small group of hyper-billionaires) to amass more capital and wealth than has ever been seen before. They do this by oppressing people all over the world (hello slavery, subsistence tenant farmers, minimum wage jobs, and sweat shops for every possible consumer good the West could ever want), extracting everything they can from our natural environment (hello fossil fuel drilling, offshore mineral mines, and a booming waste export industry), and creating ever decreasing social value (hello the bloated finance industry, silicone valley unicorn speculation and convenience capitalism) for ever greater profit. They profit by intentionally building these externalities into their business models. The whole project is rigged in favour of the mega rich. The inherent inequality and injustice of it all is built into the system. Everyone feeling insecure and alienated is by design.
This isn’t to say that the issues impacting black and communities of colour are the same that impact white people - NOT AT ALL. Being at the visible end of disadvantage - where authorities are actively killing them with no consequences has triggered black people to do the work to save themselves and their own communities - and in doing so they’re dismantling systems that affect everyone’s ability to thrive. What is happening is that black people are (once again) doing the work that is the responsibility of all of us.
We should ALL be rising up against those who have the means to solve global poverty but are instead investing in ever more complicated offshore financial schemes that create nothing of actual value. We should ALL be rising up against big businesses making billions and still refusing to pay their (mostly black and minority) staff a living hourly wage. We should ALL be rioting in the streets to see a 46,000 year old sacred place blown to smithereens in the name of “progress”.
I am no expert on the experience of black and minority communities and their experiences of racism and disempowerment. At all. All I know is that I have benefitted from it. I also know that I have a role to play here.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
We all have to do the work, because surely black people are exhausted.
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