International Women's Day & the Inadequacy of Reform

On International Women’s Day, a few dozen students at my school held a rally and speakout for women and girls to share their experiences and why they need feminism. Many of their comments focused on incidents of catcalling, slut-shaming, being harassed or otherwise silenced or objectified. It was a welcome space affording a voice to these students, though few spoke of any overarching concept of ideology and oppression. The speakout was firmly enclosed within the lens of gender and sexism.

Is it what we need for a revolutionary women’s liberation movement? No, but is it totally useless or without any place at all? I’d say no. It's a starting point. Recognizing and adjusting to where people’s priorities and consciousness lie can form a perfectly workable frame for expanding to a view of broader oppression and interlinked issues. If a person’s primary experiences and lens center around gender--or race, or disability, etc.--that in itself isn't, in my opinion and experience, something “real” revolutionaries with “better” analysis should rush to change. Frames of identity do not inexorably produce shallow or restricted conclusions about the world.

This is a line we’ve got to tread carefully. I've been in meetings where “identity politics” becomes such a thorny issue that I hear more people denounce it out of hand than actually consider how to account for and include disparate identities in the broader struggle we’re supposedly working for. An over-emphasis on identities, and the accompanying tokenization, obsequiousness, and sometimes reductionist arguments could understandably obstruct the progress of liberation movements, but refusing to account for nuance, and dismissing concerns rooted in identity, is also an ineffective and exclusive road.

The focus on identity will make or break our movement. It’s a necessary component, but we need to get it right, or it will erode or be used against us.

There are certain obvious pitfalls of the umbrella of often shallow anti-oppression thought known as identity politics: the self-righteousness of attracting token minorities to your group, the setting of quotas for surface-level “diversity” points, the idea of “trickle-down empowerment,” white feminism, the atomized thinking about separate oppressions (“I can't be racist because I'm gay”). There are also divisive and dangerous uses of identity politics employed by right wing or even neonazi forces, e.g. invoking concern for women’s freedoms in order to advocate for a Muslim ban, to “protect” women from Islam.

But the binary narrative on identity--centered or dismissed--has damaging potential either way. If our goal isn't systemic change, we will leave people behind. For instance, prioritizing a reform like closing the wage gap leaves behind those whose oppressive situation isn’t exactly alleviated by that reform alone. Similarly, in the early twentieth century women’s movement, the focus on suffrage left behind (or deliberately excluded) women of color and all others whose liberation required a great deal more than the vote.

The corollary is that if our goal is only systemic change, lacking nuance around identity, we will still leave people behind. This paradigm appears in the argument that class should be the ultimate and solitary lens through which a revolutionary analysis and praxis can emerge, which provides a one-size-fits-all “liberation” that doesn't account for varying situations of oppression and excludes people whose experience of oppression is compounded by and not necessarily founded in their class status.

Women's struggle must be a struggle of all people against sexism and capitalism, and the struggle against capitalism must be women's struggle. Neither should be expected to be totally subsumed by the other. Failure to overcome divides between gender and race and class means those identities can be used to divide us. For instance, class solidarity is undermined when men who are exploited under capitalism are taught to take refuge in the entitlement of their masculinity and/or whiteness, to blame the advancement of women and people of color instead of blaming our dehumanizing economic model. Class oppression is thus reified through sexism and racism.

Capitalism did not create sexism, but utilized it heavily to exploit unpaid female labor. Sexism was logically incorporated into capitalism because the sanctification of property only strengthened the preexisting concept of women as property, thereby deepening gender oppression. These systems work in tandem, but eliminating one will not by default eliminate the other. Women have never lived neatly separated single-issue lives--and the struggle against gender oppression must be more than just a women’s movement, since distilling it to only “women's” issues locks nonbinary people out of the conversation.

A risk of the identity politics approach is that of separating women from other issues and reducing them to gender. War, for instance, is easily a feminist issue but rarely appears in the conversation. Not framing it like that allows for the bizarre contradictions in imperialist arguments about how the US invades other countries to “help” or “free” the women there. How can we talk about women's liberation through war, as though women will somehow be exempted from the casualties of those wars? It's not like our bombs miraculously avoid the women they are liberating. Similarly, when Israel claims to be LGBTQ-friendly, accepting that argument requires abstracting queer rights from the lived experience of occupation, because it isn't as though LGBTQ Palestinians aren't also bombed, or receive better treatment at checkpoints or jails. The rhetoric of identity, placed in a vacuum, can be rendered meaningless and serve to just put a more liberal, progressive face on systems of oppression.

It is necessary to reconcile the importance of identities and specific experiences while putting forth strong political analysis and praxis, based on more than settling for trickle down empowerment or for only changing the face of the same system. And we all have to start somewhere, with whatever background and experiences we bring.

So I would have appreciated if the event at my school had had a broader vision and story to tell about gender oppression, but there is still benefit in just sharing experiences and focusing on upholding and affirming women’s identities. It’s a step in a process of education and realization about our situations in the world. Systemic feminism, intersectional feminism, isn’t everyone’s starting place, but it can--must--be a destination no matter where we begin.

Using a frame explicitly grounded in gender and sexist oppression, radical philosophy like bell hooks’s poses the necessary questions and illustrates the contradictions that push us toward a broader, intersectional, revolutionary feminism. Reform is exposed as fundamentally inadequate when we consider: who are we reforming the system for? Who does “justice” cater to? What counts as progress? To whose level do we want to be made equal? Who gets left behind?

Peace in (Another) Age of Wars

In these times, working for peace may seem like a dead end. But it's a mistake to conceive of peace issues as separate from everything else that people are fighting for right now. Peace as a concept, as a story we enact about how we want to live in the world with each other, should be a core part of the vision we want to build, now and in the future.

Resisting the Trump regime must be about more than holding the line, or defeating certain egregious policies or actions. We need to think in terms of overarching change to what this world could be. Because the crises that we are facing -- like xenophobia and attacks on immigrants, Islamophobia and threats to refugees and Muslims, sexism and homophobia and dangers to women and LGBTQ (especially transgender) people -- did not originate solely in this administration, and will not go away even if Democrats regain power. Treating each crisis we face, each particular group under attack, as a single issue will undermine our ability to face systemic challenges. An over-compartmentalized resistance will not be effective.

Peace activism is a very workable frame with which to understand this, given how clearly foreign policy has domestic impact. How many refugees seek sanctuary here as a direct result of the destruction and destabilization that US wars and operations have sowed, from Iraq to Syria to Somalia? How many undocumented immigrants flee the poverty and violence that US policy, from regime change in Honduras to neoliberal trade deals with Mexico, has wrought? Foreign policy doesn't operate in a vacuum that ends at US borders -- it returns. The tens of billions of dollars in additional military spending that Trump promises will strip public sector and social support programs, and people in the US will feel that strain, just as people further away feel the impact of our engorged military power.

The military is not strictly a force based in foreign action, in any case -- the trickle-down of military equipment to domestic police has frequently turned law enforcement into something resembling an occupying force, armed to the teeth, terrorizing civilians -- witness incidents of police brutality against people of color, or police repression of protests, or the vicious crackdowns against water protectors in Standing Rock and elsewhere. These are easily peace issues. Our militarism and violence was never restricted to foreign entanglements.

The story of US exceptionalism and the imposition of our imperialist, capitalist agenda is enacted on both ends, at home and further away. The same story that keeps US bombs falling in the Middle East, that keeps us allied with Saudi Arabia and Israel, that keeps our civil liberties dwindling at home, also keeps us bent on destroying the environment for profit and discounting the lives of marginalized people.

The climate justice movement has begun to speak more about environmental sacrifice zones, places written off so that corporations can continue unrestricted pillaging in the name of economic growth. The prioritization of profit and corporate power also maintains sacrifice people. The story we tell about the “inevitable” and “natural” march of Western capitalism and US “indispensable” power fundamentally creates a justification for devaluing people and countries, just as it does for destroying the planet. -- 539 --

Resistance under the Trump regime should reckon with these imperative questions: whose lives are worth saving, when the stakes are highest? For whom do we want to build a better, more peaceful world? And in times of crisis, as well as in the day-to-day--who will we allow to be sacrificed? Peace activism understands the deep danger and immorality of sacrificing faraway countries and demonizing their people, and we have to keep in mind the same vicious story being played out on many levels at home, and how that connects not just to foreign policy but to the overall goal of a peaceful world.

Finally, as the roots of the issues we face did not come from nowhere, it would be unwise to focus on only small actions or settle for a return to the Obama-era status quo. If there's any issue for which it’s extremely clear that the world was not headed for peace and justice under Democrats either, peace activism exemplifies that. Tipping the power back to the Democrats may for some of us take the edge off of the current feeling of crisis, but it will genuinely solve no peace issues. Regime change, war, brinkmanship with Russia, not to mention mass deportations, erosion of civil liberties, climate destruction, racist violence, and any number of oppressions, would continue with Democrats as well. We won't legislate our way -- at least certainly not all the way -- to peace. We need to change the story we tell about each other and the world, and to protect and defend one another in whatever ways we can.

The world will not get more peaceful under Trump, but as we try to build a resistance, we can still struggle to dismantle the dehumanizing ideological beliefs that have manufactured and justified war, oppression, and/or violence under every administration, so we can tell a different story, and refuse to fall for the lack of progress when anyone, Democrats or Republicans alike, sells it to us.

Dissecting Rhetoric on Immigration

Perhaps a piece of good news in this hellscape is that my city just passed an ordinance to become a sanctuary city and refuse to cooperate with immigration officials hunting undocumented people. I’m pleased with my city for rallying to do anything at all, and I have been heartened by the turnout of people and groups who came together to rally, testify, and pack city council meetings.

However, I am also disappointed, or concerned, with the frames and messaging and rhetoric that they’ve been using in this campaign, which finds a wider parallel, to some extent, in the immigrant-ally demonstrations in general.

Instead of genuinely centering on the issue of undocumented people who are in a state of heightening danger, my city has chosen to center the police forces: I attended a meeting in which the top priorities in nearly every speech made, either for or against the sanctuary city ordinance, was concern for the safety of the police and assurance that their ability to do their jobs would never be constrained; the second priority seemed to be concern over violating federal law.

It is, of course, important to tailor a frame to an audience, but that can be done without fully misplacing our concern and priorities. Neither is it just the city council, from whom perhaps this diluted, cautious concern and hailing of our law enforcement officers is all we could expect. It's also the community as a whole, illustrated unnervingly by kids at rallies with Thank You, Police! signs. There is a curious total amnesia and disconnect between the perception and reality of the the police. People ardently defend the police and credit them (rather than our overwhelming whiteness and richness) for our “safety.” US society in general has long refused to reckon with the core function of cops, which is to uphold and protect the interests of the state and ruling powers. The police are a militarized apparatus of enforcement of the status quo, resulting in massive, systematic harm to people of color, disabled people, queer people, poor people, and other marginalized groups. Yet in our meetings about making our city safer and more welcoming, in theory, it is the agents of a deadly system whose sanctity, humanity and freedom is of chief concern.

Justice should not be tailored to or contingent on approval from the forces that routinely obstruct it.

In my observation, there is a quiet, ironic process of dehumanization occurring here, dehumanizing the people we claim to aim to protect, for purposes of Cover Your Ass and self-righteousness. Besides the police, the other central actors in this debate were the privileged people of my town, who were repeatedly assured that above all “we won't put ourselves in harm’s way” by keeping the police from cracking down on crimes committed by undocumented people. Invoking the specter of immigrants bringing harm to this community relegates and dehumanizes undocumented immigrants to the role of purveyors of harm, and establishes a dichotomy wherein the “us” is protected against the “them” by the police.

The issue of hunting and deporting undocumented immigrants is further removed from its human dimension when classic white-moderate delay tactics are invoked, cautioning that we shouldn't move too quickly on this, that it might lose us money, that we need more time and more facts. And then the idea that we “don't even have this problem” or that “this isn't a local issue” just confirms that some people here do not want to see immigrants as part of their community, or consider that that community might be at all at risk from national trickle-down danger.

These unpleasant undertones to a well-meaning campaign are reflected more generally in the immigrant support rhetoric at protests and demonstrations. Much of it tries to spin Trump’s slogan, Make America Great Again, by talking about how “immigrants make America great” and “we are all immigrants.” Before we jump on board with these slogans, here are a few thoughts about their deeper import:

• Who are we talking about when we say “all”?
• Before we were a “country,” the land that is now called the US was (and is) inhabited by many Indigenous nations, who are not immigrants.
• Were the first European “immigrants,” who established this settler-colonial state, more rightly called immigrants or invaders? Which so-called immigrants are we talking about when we say they make this country great?
• Under what conditions did people arrive to the US? Were they immigrants or forced migrants, slave labor?
• How many were actually welcomed? Who was excluded? Who did not apparently make us great? Think Chinese Exclusion Act, immigration quotas, Bracero Program, Operation Wetback.
• Lives have value beyond patriotic contributions. We should protect undocumented people as part of a wider struggle against dehumanization, not because some of them might have useful exploitable skills.
• On that thought, do immigrants make us great because of their human contributions to our general society, or because of token diversity and/or the fruits of exploited immigrant labor?
• How well does support for immigrants transfer to support for refugees, who may lack the comforting economically exploitable skills and who frequently reflect direct human casualties of US war and imperialism? Do they make the US great, too? By what criteria is their value decided?

Also, immigrants certainly play a massive role in the advances, sustenance, economy, and social fabric of the US, but what is implicit in the claim that the US is in fact great? MAGA is a thin veneer for white supremacy, but that does not obligate us to espouse the opposite sentiment, that the US is already great and doesn't need to be made anything different. Believing that the US needs to change is not the problem. Envisioning that change as a reconquest by a nostalgized past of white supremacy, social oppressions, free markets, and national glory is the flesh that can make the skeleton of “change” a program of systematic dehumanization. The US is not great, and we do need change, but we need it through humanization, justice, and liberation.