The world-wide outpouring of rage immediately following the inauguration of Donald Trump was dazzling and heartening. Women in the lead, connections and intersectionality in the air, humor, art, determination, solidarity—the people rising, the popular opposition on display. I loved so many signs waving in the streets of Washington: “Fight like a girl!”; “If my uterus shot bullets it would have more protection than it does now;” “If it’s not intersectional, it’s not my feminism;” “I love my nasty mom.”
We can and we must build a broad social movement in fierce and effective opposition to Trumpism, and for a world in balance.
It’s time to organize a powerful resistance.
And that means in part getting smart, paying attention, waking up in new ways.
White folks need to get over the illusion of innocence.
I remember years ago watching a sequence from the documentary, “Shoah.” The film maker was standing in a public square in formerly occupied France within sight of a station where Jews were loaded onto trains and transported to death camps. interviewing a villager. The film maker kept asking what the villager thought at the time. We didn’t know, he said. We didn’t know about the camps. But you knew they were rounded up. Yes, but we didn’t know why. Well, you could see them packed into box cars. Yes, but we didn’t know…
The question is, what do you need to know in order to know? Or, from another angle of regard, when is the claim of innocence simply a fraud and a lie?
Here in the US, if you look you’ll see that the criminal justice system and the prison industrial complex are institutions of congealed violent white supremacy; if you open your eyes, you can see that African Americans living in racially isolated communities of concentrated poverty is the result of cold-blooded federal policy.
Gather your classmates or your fellow workers or your neighbors. Talk about this moment and where we are on the clock of the world. Discuss what you are willing to do collectively to resist the shredding of civil liberties, and to protect vulnerable populations.
Start a reading group, and go deep to understand the world we live in. Start here: Angela Davis; Keeanga Taylor; Jeff Chang; Ta-Nehisi Coats; Junot Diaz; Saffire; Allison Bechdel, Fun Home; Sandra Cisneros; Sherman Alexi; Claudia Rankine; Jesmyn Ward.
And be agile: When Trump lies and the press somehow at last summons the courage to call him on it (Trump Advances Two Falsehoods, says the NY Times), and the administration threatens to “hold them to account,” create a brigade of fact spreaders.
When Trump promotes an “America First” agenda, note the facsist echoes from the early Twentieth Century.
When a page on the new White House website announces that “The Trump Administration will be a law and order administration,” and adds that “Standing Up for Our Law Enforcement Community” is a top priority and that “President Trump will honor our men and women in uniform and will support their mission of protecting the public. The dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America is wrong. The Trump Administration will end it.” It continues that “Our job is not to make life more comfortable for the rioter, the looter, or the violent disrupter.”
This is a threat to the Black Lives Matter movement.
What do you need to know, to know?
Bill Ayers 