In the immediate aftermath of the election of an unqualified, hate-mongering bigot to the office of president, I didn’t know how to think about anything else. I changed all of my class plans to focus on discussing what just happened to us. I called my representatives and signed petitions and wrote anti-Bannon screeds and donated every last penny I had to Planned Parenthood and the ACLU. I went to progressive meet ups and had long post-mortem discussions with family and friends.
For me, that was the right amount of attention to give the situation in that moment. It deserved nothing less. But like a lot of other horrified American citizens, I’m starting to grasp that a long-term commitment to resisting this administration is going to require a more measured approach. When Steve Bannon was announced as a cabinet pick, I was pissed off and scared enough to call or write someone about it every day. When Betsy DeVos was announced, and then Ben Carson (not once, but twice!), and Jeff Sessions, and Steve Mnuchin, and Scott Pruitt, and Rex Tillerson … I started to get overwhelmed.
I need a long-term strategy to help keep me from that feeling of being up against too much if I’m going to be able to act effectively in a consistent way.
This is my personalized plan for resisting this administration effectively:
1. Realize that I was already doing resistance work, and do it more strategically now.
I’m lucky that I’m an educator, because my day to day life is already structured around work that can help us to survive and think past Trump’s administration. My research is about how white supremacist theories of human development influenced modernist poetics. I’m well-versed in the history of racist thinking and the insidious (and overt) ways it permeates our cultural fabric. Because I teach American literature and history from this angle, I already teach students to think harder about race and class and gender and sexuality in this country than they may have been encouraged to do before.
But from here on out, I’m specifically committing myself to explaining, more than once a semester in all of my classes, that race is not a biological reality. Racial categories are about power and domination, not genetics. This is something I cover in my intro to literary analysis classes when we talk about postcolonial and race studies, but it hasn’t been something that I’ve explicitly incorporated into American lit surveys before. Some students already know this, but many don’t. It’s information they can’t afford to ignore, and it’s information that they may not get elsewhere.
I’m also explicitly committing myself to explaining, more than once a semester in all of my classes, that our economic system was built on slavery and settler colonialism. Again, we get to this in the intro class, but it needs to be a structural part of my other American lit courses as well. This is where divisions in this country come from, not from elitist liberals and reactionary red staters. This is where we must focus our attention.
I’m 99.9% positive that these are not facts that many white Missouri high schoolers get exposed to (my students of color have spoken up in class about how these are facts they grew up with, and how it’s frustrating for them that they’re not common knowledge among their peers). I’m also positive that there is a substantial population of white students at my institution who do not currently believe that race is an issue that concerns them but who are capable of being persuaded that in fact it concerns them very much (testimonies this semester by white students make this clear).
Angela Davis closed a speech she gave in St. Louis last year with the words “we have only just begun to tell the truth about violence in America” (Freedom Is a Constant Struggle 90). I will help to tell this truth every time I am in the classroom.
2. Realize that the fight has been going on long before Trump and will go on long after he’s gone.
I’m taking my cue from the folks who have been at this fight much longer than I have – the ones who understand that we have always been fighting white supremacist misogyny, and we always will be. That “in this world there is only incremental progress.” That love is not a victory march.
I’ve been struck time and again at planning meetings for progressive groups by how those who have already been organizing and lobbying are able to remain focused on the work even as they’re terrified of what’s coming down the pipeline. They’re able to see our current moment, dark as it is, as part of a much larger history. The long view gives me courage and reminds me to stay focused on the actions and ideas that can stop some of the damage. Victories will be small, but they will be there.
3. Tap into existing organizations and volunteer.
There is already infrastructure on the ground, locally and nationally, that I can contribute my time and money and energy to. I started volunteering with Planned Parenthood pretty much immediately upon moving to Missouri, and post-election I set up regularly scheduled donations to PP and the ACLU, among other groups. I’m signing up for lobby days, attending informational meetings, and figuring out where I can be most useful in these existing groups.
Individual actions are good and important, but they’re not enough. Individuals alone do not change oppressive systems; collective organizing does. Progressives are panicking about our fundamental lack of organization, but this panic is, I think, misdirected. We are organized in many significant but dispersed ways. Finding ways for the highly active local progressive groups who have already been doing organizing work to collaborate is going to be the way forward (we are, after all, the majority, and we are already united behind the fundamental principle that all Americans deserve civil liberties). I’m heartened in my local community by the contact, planning, and collaboration that is happening already between groups with divergent but complementary interests and by the focus on impacting what happens in our state legislature. This is how we make a difference.
Angela Davis again, speaking about Ferguson:
“I do think that movements require time to develop and mature. They don’t happen spontaneously. They occur as a result of organizing and hard work that most often happens behind the scenes. Over the last two decades I would say, there has actually been sustained organizing against police violence, racism, racist police violence, against prisons, the prison-industrial complex, and I think that the sustained protests we are seeing now have a great deal to do with that organizing. They reflect the fact that the political consciousness in so many communities is so much higher than people think.” (36)
4. Continue to call and write to my representatives, just at a less breakneck pace.
Right after everything went down, I made calls and wrote letters and emails and signed petitions every day. I wish I could continue to do that, but it’s unsustainable for me. I’m dedicating Tuesday mornings from here on out to phone calls to representatives.
I’m using the actionnow mailing list and the “We’re His Problem Now” google doc (praise be to crowdsourcing and document sharing!) to keep me apprised of important actions, and I’ll plan on unplanned emergency actions being a part of my weekly routine.
5. Stay angry. Stay informed.
Anger is useful. It can be, and has been for me, life sustaining. It motivates me to keep fighting for what I believe in even when I’m tired and it seems pointless. Anger at unjust systems is at the root of continued and effective resistance to those systems.
Staying informed for me means not just staying on top of all the atrocities the Trump administration is perpetuating and will continue to perpetuate, but also staying informed about the past, present, and future of activist work. I started this weekend with Freedom is a Constant Struggle (hence all the Angela Davis quotes in this post) and will keep educating myself, reading works from past and present progressive thinkers about how to move forward. (Interested in educating yourself also? Check out this bibliography I put together for my students.)
I’m committed to effective political action in all its forms, which includes visible and vocal resistance to murderous systems. Silence is complicity; silence is death. As Davis reminds us, protest large and small is part of effective political action. From her speech in St. Louis:
“I am here simply because I want to thank you Ferguson activists, because you refused to drop the torch of struggle. When you were urged to go home and go back to business as usual, you said no and in the process you made Ferguson a worldwide symbol of resistance. At a time when we are urged to settle for fast solutions, easy answers, formulaic resolutions, Ferguson protesters said no. You were determined to continue to make the issues of violence against Black communities visible. You refused to believe there were any simplistic answers and you demonstrated that you would not allow this issue to be buried in the graveyard that has not only claimed Black lives but also so many struggles to defend those lives. So I join the millions of people who thank you for not giving up, for not going home. For staking our claim for freedom on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, with such great power that Ferguson has become synonymous with progressive protest from Palestine to South Africa, from Syria to Germany, and Brazil to Australia.” (83)
This is my plan moving forward. What’s yours?