I talk to a lot of white people. The town I now call home is 88.7% white. The town I grew up in is 98% white (not an exaggeration, that is the actual 2010 census number). The city I called home for the last ten years, like so many other American cities, is built on decades of redlining and segregation and white fear.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the calls, immediately post election, to pay more attention to angry white people. We haven’t paid attention to rural white poverty, the story goes. What about the opioid crisis and the 2008 economic crash and the rapidly dropping life expectancies for white Americans?
Yes. These things matter. We have to listen and we have to figure out how to address the needs of as many American citizens as possible.
But.
What about the people of color who, literally since the beginning of the colonization of this continent, have been explaining, eloquently, loudly, and constantly, how much pain they are in? How they are murdered and assaulted and berated for merely existing every single day? Where was the empathy and the understanding when black Americans were being jailed for marijuana possession, which now provides lucrative career opportunities for white entrepreneurs? Why wasn’t crack treated as a public health crisis? Who was listening then? Where was white America? We didn’t show up. We didn’t listen. We didn’t care. We never have. Not as a collective body.
Given our nation’s history and our refusal to acknowledge that history, this is unsurprising. But it is a point that can’t be lost as we strategize about how to deal with the open racism (not to mention misogyny, and ableism, and religious animosity, and xenophobia…) that Trump made trendy. Yes, we have to address the needs of poor white people. We also have to address the needs of poor people of color, who, let’s not forget, also lost factory jobs and coal mining jobs and management jobs when those sad angry white people lost theirs. (Though I’m obviously annoyed about the attention angry white people are getting, nota bene that my dad, a rural white man, lost his white collar job to outsourcing and corporate greed. He now drives truck, 14-16 hours a day, at the age of 60. He’s not sure when he can retire, especially with social security and medicare hanging in the balance. I’m not unsympathetic to how incredibly hard it is for working Americans trying to make a living. But my dad knows damn well that brown people aren’t the ones who put him in this position.)
So how do we attend to the needs of working class whites and working class people of color? Move to the goddamn left already, Democrats. Unite us in our shared opposition to the super wealthy who are screwing all of us. Make your message clear and catchy and impossible to ignore. Quit. Giving. The. Super. Wealthy. More. Power. Trump is an actual movie villain, for crying out loud. Listen to the pain of angry white people, yes, but then teach them that brown people did not cause their pain. Trump and his kind did.
In the aftermath of a crisis I get intensely practical. I can’t seem to stop myself from formulating plans and urging people to action. The problem of how we talk to white Trump supporters (the one who just ignored racism, since the ones who are proudly racist are probably beyond hope) so they understand that economic pain is caused by income inequality, not by immigrants and/or black or brown people, is huge and must be tackled on many fronts. Parts of this fight are currently out of the control of individual civilians. The worst has happened and we’ve put someone completely bent on normalizing racism while pulling in cash hand over fist in the White House. The next four years are going to be an utter disaster. But I still think that we can do some damage control as individuals, in two ways, one concrete and one more abstract:
1) Put as bluntly as possible, progressives have to show the fuck up (posting articles on Facebook does not count as showing the fuck up). If you know nothing about local politics, teach yourself real damn fast. Find out who is on your city council and in your state legislature and who your congresspeople are. Figure out who is going to run in midterm elections and support them (volunteer for their campaign; donate money; talk about them with your friends and family and on social media). Support Emily’s List and She Should Run and Off the Sidelines. Are you a woman, a person of color, a non-straight person? Consider running for something. Change starts locally. When a politician proposes something that is going to hurt American citizens, call your representatives early and often and let them know that their constituents do not support that legislation (Sign up for actionnow and check the “We’re His Problem Now” Google doc for alerts about damaging legislation). When politicians speak up and act for what is right, call or write to thank them. Let them know you’re watching. We can’t sit on the sidelines anymore and expect someone else to fix things. If this election has shown us nothing else, it’s shown us that.
2) Listen to PJ Harvey. Specifically, listen to the song “Me-Jane.”
“Me-Jane” proposes something like an ethics of attention. Put simply, when violence happens, you attend to the person who’s bleeding, not the person who’s screaming. And it reminds us that the person bleeding is never going to be the angry white man; the angry white man is always going to be the person causing the bleeding.
I listen to this song every time I’m mad about misogyny (I listen to this song a lot), but it’s gaining new resonances for me these days. It so neatly skewers racist patriarchal logic and so satisfyingly insists on the voices of those who are done harm by it. In the first verse and chorus, Jane (of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ colonialist fantasy Tarzan of the Apes) speaks:
Damn your chest-beating, just you stop your screaming.
You’re splitting through my head and swinging from the ceiling.
Oh, move it over Tarzan, can’t you see I’m bleeding?
I’ve called you by your first name, good lord it’sMe-Jane!
I’m running
split head
I’m reeling
Me-Jane
Me-Jane
The screaming white man always demands attention, regardless of what else is happening. “Can’t you see I’m bleeding?” Jane asks, and of course the answer isn’t “how can I help?” – it seems to be “who are you again?” (”good lord it’s Me-Jane!”).
Importantly, the speaker is not just Jane in this song, it is Me-Jane. Thanks to the Tarzan movie franchise, the exchange between the two that everyone knows goes, “Me Tarzan, you Jane.” The syntax privileges Tarzan; he is, of course, our hero. He is the subject, Jane is the object. Harvey’s song reverses this objectification. This Jane will not be a you. This Jane is me. Me-Jane. You Tarzan. Now shut up, Tarzan, and let me speak.
Damn your chest-beating just you stop your screaming.
All the time he hunting, swimming, fishing, breeding.
Don’t you ever stop and give me time to breathe-in?
I’ve called you by your first name, good lord it’sMe-Jane!
I’m running
split head
I’m reeling
Me-Jane
I’m trying
To make sense
of your screamingDon’t lord it on me
Don’t lord it on me
Don’t lord it over me
Tarzan sets the agenda (hunting, swimming, fishing, breeding – in the jungle as in our red states) and forces Jane to try “To make sense/ of [his] screaming.” “Don’t lord it on me” reminds us that Burroughs’ Tarzan was British nobility, brought to Africa through colonial transit. And Gail Bederman reminds us that in Burroughs’ novels, Tarzan is introduced as “the killer of beasts and many black men,” and that he saves Jane, a white American, from being raped by a black ape (this is the beginning of their love story, naturally). This song reminds us that white masculinity kills in the name of purity (women’s imagined purity; nonexistent racial purity; ideological purity). It always has. This song is the fantasy of getting that killing masculinity to stop, even for a second, and to listen to the voice of one of the people it makes bleed.
In the recorded version, the song ends with a plaintive “Jane” from Rob Ellis (at least I think it’s Rob Ellis – I have no liner notes to guide me), which to me always sounds like a diminished Tarzan, finally speaking Jane’s name and perhaps pausing in his screaming to let her “breathe-in.” It gives me chills, no matter how many times I listen. It’s a fantasy I’ve always needed, but one I need especially now.
We can’t continue to let Tarzan set the agenda. Now is not the time to try to make sense of his screaming. Now is the time to get him to listen. I don’t have the answers for how. We have to figure these answers out together.
James Baldwin knew this (James Baldwin knew everything). In The Fire Next Time, he wrote,
“I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. … But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”
It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.
It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.
It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.
Attend to the bleeding, not the screaming. We don’t need to figure out how to cater to angry white America. We need to figure out how to get them to understand what they’re actually mad about.
Baldwin again:
“They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity.”
We need to offer something in place of that toxic, killing identity.
“[I]f the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.”
We will not make America great again because it has never been truly great. We have to make it something it’s never been: a nation that isn’t ruled by white fear and sustained by black death. We can make America what America must become. We have no other choice.