Fantastic bit of writing. Great stuff, thanks. Yes, a point I keep making is that there will always be a trump - before this trump there was Bush the younger, and before him there was Reagan, and after trump there will be another trump (my money would be on Elon Musk). So if we allow the existence of something further to the right to make us give a blank check to the democrats, we will continue being ratcheted into fascism.
That's an excellent point, Amos! And the reality is that Project 2025 is also really nothing new. The Democrats are no longer a left wing party. We need to face that reality.
I think it’s also worth bearing in mind that liberalism has always been a competitor to socialism, and never really an ally to it. In Britain in the 1920s, the liberals did not move far enough to the left to outflank labour, so labour became the opposition; in America the liberals did manage to scoop enough left votes to remain the opposition, but this was always an exercise in triangulation rather than a genuine alliance. The liberal movement therefore has always had an incentive to suppress socialism and has used the right’s pantomime villains as the greater evil in this performance.
Liberalism is not “left”, we need to recognise this and stop waiting for anything to come from them.
Excellent analysis. And post Jan 6th the thinking of the "left" became that fascism is the only enemy and that the only way to defeat that enemy is to move to the center right. Raskin of MD and Pelosi cooked up this scheme. If they win with it, we won't defeat fascism; we will get authoritarianism. In any case the right may decide they like the modifications the left has made to the general understanding of the 1st amendment. We are living during interesting times.
Fabulous work Pamela- a comprehensive and compelling argument for why Americans need to look beyond ‘lesser evilism’ and work together for real change ❤️
Incredible writing - the clarity, the undeniable structured clarity of it ❤️ Every word rings important and true, was so hard to pick a quote to restack because I kept finding new amazing ones.
Thanks for this clearly articulated means of considering the choices we voters confront in 2024. You’re opening about the shoulders of the sisters we stand on, Tubman, Terrell, and Chisholm, amplifies the need for solidarity with marginalized peoples resisting white supremacy. Being in the club is the problem since settler supremacy is about only letting in those who will support the oppressive suprastructure held up by degrading human rights through apartheid. This essay’s clarion call to avoid complicity with genocide and vote for survival is a necessary admonition for a future of collective liberation. Love that opening picture of Tubman reclaiming the color orange.
I love this point, Gladwyn! You only get in the club by aligning with the "oppressive suprastructure." What an excellent point! Honestly, once the dust settles and the genocide stops, I can't imagine how I will feel about the people who were complicit.
This is really excellent, and deeply disturbing. I will need to read it several times to absorb it, and I’ll want to pass it on to friends and family. As a white woman, I hadn’t been aware of Harris’s assault on poor Black families through her truancy bill. It was utterly horrifying, and should be widely known. She is not a good or ethical person. But it’s her support for genocide that has most appalled me. No one should vote for such a person. No one. The fact that Biden and Trump are also liars and bullies who support genocide makes me wonder what this country actually is?
BTW, like Trump and Biden, Harris is also a bully IMHO. To me, that famous “I’m speaking” moment is an act of bullying.
I also didn't know about the truancy law. A neighbor shared that info with me and it led me down a bit of a rabbit hole. I think a lot of her policies lack integrity. She is really good at politics and seems devoid of a conscience. I do think she's a psychological hostage. Unfortunately, it really looks like the Zionists have captured our government. Polls show the majority want an arms embargo - in other words for us to follow the law. And yet she's making the case that the genocide is a necessary evil so we can have lower grocery prices... Unreal. Thanks so much for your positive feedback!
Brilliant piece, Pamela; your succinct deconstruction of the "vote for the lesser of two evils" fallacy of this election (and really every one of them since 2016) is undeniable. I also appreciate the perspective on how Harris has wronged your community as someone from outside of that space who tends to attack her more on her genocide apologia. Writers like you on this platform reaffirm my faith in humanity, bit by bit.
Thanks so much, Sawyer! I'm also thankful for this platform - it seems like the only place where we can express dissent. I hope it lasts! And it feels like people have amnesia. A lot of her record was challenged by Black and brown communities when Biden picked her for VP. But, honestly, there is nothing that she has done in my mind worse than commit genocide. It's beyond me that I see robots on the streets of NY wearing "I voted" stickers and not seeing that our vote got us here. Frankly, I am ashamed of my fellow humans. And I agree that this platform is restoring some of my faith. Thanks so much for being a part of this community!
Thanks for this, Pamela. Underlining how the powerful are moving the goal posts on freedom of speech stood out for me. Especially because of how the equivalent right functions here in Canada.
You've also reminded me of Cornell West pointing out that Harris owes her position to the work of people like Fannie Lou Hamer and others, but she is not part of their lineage or tradition. When it comes to Harris do you see this as a situation of power corrupting or of power attracting the corruptable?
Wow, Justin. That's a really interesting question. Many of us grew up with parents who participated in the Civil Rights movement. The theory of change for the ones who were more aligned with MLK than with Malcolm X (not that this isn't somewhat of a false divide, but hopefully you see my point) was that the next generation would integrate and assimilate - that we would prove ourselves by competing on a slanted playing field, and earn our seat at the table by showing that "Black" is only a shade of skin color. We were MLKs dream in action.
But unfortunately, this didn't work out. 50 years after the Civil Rights movement and legislation, we actually have an expanding racialized lack of fairness. It's true that fewer Blacks live in poverty and that is definitely important, but the gaps are striking and have not changed - in many ways they increased. I think the wealth gap is somewhat of a driver of this, but that's another article that I plan to write in the next few weeks.
And so, I think a lot of what has happened is that many of us built identities around who our parents guided us to become. But sometimes we need to reassess and change based on new information - hard for all of us humans to do. We have to understand the nature of us leaving other Black people behind. And I think that nature is that by being "Black friends" we inadvertently allow our identities to be used in service of white supremacy and we only get personal gain in return. The problem is that as a result of taking on this kind of Black friend identity we leave behind Blacks as a group and this is a matter of justice. We have to make a difficult choice. So I think that this is a matter of power attracting the corruptible. It's not so much even being corrupt, as it is this idea that we are doing it in part for our people per se. My issue with this is that I'd like to know what is Harris' theory of change and does social change, ending racism really mean anything deep to her. Or does she have an alternative to the Black achievement theory?
One interesting alternative was Alexis de Tocqueville's. In Democracy in America published in around 1835 and 1840, he proposed that the way racism will end in America is through the "mulatto" or person of mixed race. It would be interesting to know Harris' thinking on change. I would guess it's about Black achievement. It would explain why she doesn't care how many bodies she steps on to reach the top - and would explain why she is so corruptible. What better way to maintain the system? Thanks for provoking me to think more about this. Looking forward to your thoughts.
Thanks for taking the time to answer my question with such humanity and thoughtfulness. It's enough to make me forget that this is the internet.
As is my way -- and training -- I'll situate myself socially before anything else. I'm the face of the most privileged people on earth: a straight, white, cis-gendered male born in a powerful nation ruled by settlers who look like me. I spent half my life critically ill, and grew up in the "wrong" place (rural and poor), but survived because my motherland (Alberta) just happens to have a huge amount of oil and my father just happens to be a heavy duty mechanic, which enabled him to go from poverty to six figures right around when my illness go serious in my early 20's. I'm trained as a pastor, but churches look at me sideways and some petty nonsense derailed any possibility of plying the trade. My background is in history/sociology. I try to live a conflicted life.
Maybe that's why, after Jesus turned me anarchist as I was waiting to die from illness, I developed an understanding of what liberation means through folk like Howard Thurman. (And by that route I sought to understand the peoples I was "supposed" to hate in the wake of 9/11, which led me to a remarkable group called Palestinians.)
Any prejudice I've ever faced is due to identifying with those who stand with their backs against the wall, as Thurman put it. It's never been because of who I AM. I am incapable of conceiving of what it's like to live every day as an "other" even as I ground myself at the edge of empire. Someone was once so upset with me that they wanted to damage me emotionally, and the worst thing they could come up with to slam my identity was that I don't act sufficiently like a straight, white man. There was no epithet he could use that would have meant anything because I'm the face of privilege. So I don't have the background to grasp, for instance, what it means to have the pressure to be a "High-Achieving Black Woman", which is a term someone explained to me just the other day.
And that's, if I understand you, what you're pointing toward. The pressure to be a "High-Achieving Black Woman" or equivalent was a well-intentioned -- and intentional -- outcome or continuation of the MLK-era struggle. But the system seeks only to perpetuate itself, and bent good intentions and good works to its own ends. Those corruptable enough could then make the claim that they were achieving and rising for the sake of all their people while pulling the ladders up behind them. They could claim to be doing just what their mothers insisted while ignoring the reasons why their mothers made the effort. So identity went from "blessed to be a blessing to others" to "blessed because I deserve it and everyone else can keep their backs against the wall". The result is Cornel West's "black mascot for Wall Street" or your "Black friends". A sincere belief in helping, but a certain amoral careerism that is the same as tearing out an eye. Having eyes and refusing to see is reprehensible, but surely it's okay to sacrifice an eye to render seeing an impossibility.
The only avenue I have available to begin understanding is rural poverty and the Prosperity Gospel that was part of regular force-feeding even on this side of the Canada-US border. That blend goes something like this: Do all the right things so you find God's favour, make us proud, and get rich enough to leave. The obvious problem being that high achievers, whatever that means, are then able to see themselves as superior. Mortals who became demi-gods glowing with divine favour because they were already s'darn perfect. Deserving lords over all the collective failure that is the rotten peasantry. If your back is against the wall and you're mired in concrete, well, you should have pulled those bootstraps to lift them clear and tromp yourself to glorious freedom. Wage class war, but only once you have have enough cash to buy an army.
This isn't unique to rural poverty, of course. The Prosperity Gospel manifests in other forms like positive psychology and "McMindfulness". I tend to see all these things as the same heresy rooted in the state religion, and the uholy antithesis to liberation. Including that of the Black prophetic tradition, to which so many of us owe so very, very much.
Maybe the mulatto formula of the current system is: anyone + a willingness to tear out an eye. Beings who insist they see two kinds of people: winners and losers. And if they can see nothing else from their glorious heights, does anything else exist?
Excellent essay. Right on target, and it makes a good point about four more Republican years—although the hidden threat is a VP taking over for an ill or disabled or sedentary oldest President in the US. Like Medicare for all, however, the large majority preferences of the citizens of the US for an end to genocide and an end to militarism and an exorbitant military budget are not about to be supported by a captive congress and senate.
No lies detected. This is all basic human decency. It is indecent to vote for the lowlifes, murderers and thieves we have to choose from. The better spoken the worse.
Fantastic bit of writing. Great stuff, thanks. Yes, a point I keep making is that there will always be a trump - before this trump there was Bush the younger, and before him there was Reagan, and after trump there will be another trump (my money would be on Elon Musk). So if we allow the existence of something further to the right to make us give a blank check to the democrats, we will continue being ratcheted into fascism.
That's an excellent point, Amos! And the reality is that Project 2025 is also really nothing new. The Democrats are no longer a left wing party. We need to face that reality.
I think it’s also worth bearing in mind that liberalism has always been a competitor to socialism, and never really an ally to it. In Britain in the 1920s, the liberals did not move far enough to the left to outflank labour, so labour became the opposition; in America the liberals did manage to scoop enough left votes to remain the opposition, but this was always an exercise in triangulation rather than a genuine alliance. The liberal movement therefore has always had an incentive to suppress socialism and has used the right’s pantomime villains as the greater evil in this performance.
Liberalism is not “left”, we need to recognise this and stop waiting for anything to come from them.
Excellent analysis. And post Jan 6th the thinking of the "left" became that fascism is the only enemy and that the only way to defeat that enemy is to move to the center right. Raskin of MD and Pelosi cooked up this scheme. If they win with it, we won't defeat fascism; we will get authoritarianism. In any case the right may decide they like the modifications the left has made to the general understanding of the 1st amendment. We are living during interesting times.
Such an outstanding article! Many won't want to accept the points that you're making, Pamela - but they're true. Brilliant!
Thanks, Leon! I felt like I just had to say something. Thanks for the support!
And those that won’t accept those points have a huge investment in the lie$$$…..
Fabulous work Pamela- a comprehensive and compelling argument for why Americans need to look beyond ‘lesser evilism’ and work together for real change ❤️
Thanks Karyn! I think we're going to get there...looking forward to the other side of this election however it turns out.
Incredible writing - the clarity, the undeniable structured clarity of it ❤️ Every word rings important and true, was so hard to pick a quote to restack because I kept finding new amazing ones.
Wow! Thanks so much! That's quite a compliment coming from you! :)
Thanks for this clearly articulated means of considering the choices we voters confront in 2024. You’re opening about the shoulders of the sisters we stand on, Tubman, Terrell, and Chisholm, amplifies the need for solidarity with marginalized peoples resisting white supremacy. Being in the club is the problem since settler supremacy is about only letting in those who will support the oppressive suprastructure held up by degrading human rights through apartheid. This essay’s clarion call to avoid complicity with genocide and vote for survival is a necessary admonition for a future of collective liberation. Love that opening picture of Tubman reclaiming the color orange.
I love this point, Gladwyn! You only get in the club by aligning with the "oppressive suprastructure." What an excellent point! Honestly, once the dust settles and the genocide stops, I can't imagine how I will feel about the people who were complicit.
This is really excellent, and deeply disturbing. I will need to read it several times to absorb it, and I’ll want to pass it on to friends and family. As a white woman, I hadn’t been aware of Harris’s assault on poor Black families through her truancy bill. It was utterly horrifying, and should be widely known. She is not a good or ethical person. But it’s her support for genocide that has most appalled me. No one should vote for such a person. No one. The fact that Biden and Trump are also liars and bullies who support genocide makes me wonder what this country actually is?
BTW, like Trump and Biden, Harris is also a bully IMHO. To me, that famous “I’m speaking” moment is an act of bullying.
I also didn't know about the truancy law. A neighbor shared that info with me and it led me down a bit of a rabbit hole. I think a lot of her policies lack integrity. She is really good at politics and seems devoid of a conscience. I do think she's a psychological hostage. Unfortunately, it really looks like the Zionists have captured our government. Polls show the majority want an arms embargo - in other words for us to follow the law. And yet she's making the case that the genocide is a necessary evil so we can have lower grocery prices... Unreal. Thanks so much for your positive feedback!
Harriet Tubman’s face opens your words and like them speaks volumes in eloquent depiction of today’s momentous moment.
Thanks, Michael!
Brilliant piece, Pamela; your succinct deconstruction of the "vote for the lesser of two evils" fallacy of this election (and really every one of them since 2016) is undeniable. I also appreciate the perspective on how Harris has wronged your community as someone from outside of that space who tends to attack her more on her genocide apologia. Writers like you on this platform reaffirm my faith in humanity, bit by bit.
Thanks so much, Sawyer! I'm also thankful for this platform - it seems like the only place where we can express dissent. I hope it lasts! And it feels like people have amnesia. A lot of her record was challenged by Black and brown communities when Biden picked her for VP. But, honestly, there is nothing that she has done in my mind worse than commit genocide. It's beyond me that I see robots on the streets of NY wearing "I voted" stickers and not seeing that our vote got us here. Frankly, I am ashamed of my fellow humans. And I agree that this platform is restoring some of my faith. Thanks so much for being a part of this community!
Thanks for writing this. Greetings from Palestine
Hi Magid! Thanks for the greetings! Where are you in Palestine? I traveled throughout the West Bank in 2015.
Hi Pamela. Now, I am in Galilee, Moved last year from Bethlehem.
(mshihade@gmail.com)
Thanks for this, Pamela. Underlining how the powerful are moving the goal posts on freedom of speech stood out for me. Especially because of how the equivalent right functions here in Canada.
You've also reminded me of Cornell West pointing out that Harris owes her position to the work of people like Fannie Lou Hamer and others, but she is not part of their lineage or tradition. When it comes to Harris do you see this as a situation of power corrupting or of power attracting the corruptable?
Wow, Justin. That's a really interesting question. Many of us grew up with parents who participated in the Civil Rights movement. The theory of change for the ones who were more aligned with MLK than with Malcolm X (not that this isn't somewhat of a false divide, but hopefully you see my point) was that the next generation would integrate and assimilate - that we would prove ourselves by competing on a slanted playing field, and earn our seat at the table by showing that "Black" is only a shade of skin color. We were MLKs dream in action.
But unfortunately, this didn't work out. 50 years after the Civil Rights movement and legislation, we actually have an expanding racialized lack of fairness. It's true that fewer Blacks live in poverty and that is definitely important, but the gaps are striking and have not changed - in many ways they increased. I think the wealth gap is somewhat of a driver of this, but that's another article that I plan to write in the next few weeks.
And so, I think a lot of what has happened is that many of us built identities around who our parents guided us to become. But sometimes we need to reassess and change based on new information - hard for all of us humans to do. We have to understand the nature of us leaving other Black people behind. And I think that nature is that by being "Black friends" we inadvertently allow our identities to be used in service of white supremacy and we only get personal gain in return. The problem is that as a result of taking on this kind of Black friend identity we leave behind Blacks as a group and this is a matter of justice. We have to make a difficult choice. So I think that this is a matter of power attracting the corruptible. It's not so much even being corrupt, as it is this idea that we are doing it in part for our people per se. My issue with this is that I'd like to know what is Harris' theory of change and does social change, ending racism really mean anything deep to her. Or does she have an alternative to the Black achievement theory?
One interesting alternative was Alexis de Tocqueville's. In Democracy in America published in around 1835 and 1840, he proposed that the way racism will end in America is through the "mulatto" or person of mixed race. It would be interesting to know Harris' thinking on change. I would guess it's about Black achievement. It would explain why she doesn't care how many bodies she steps on to reach the top - and would explain why she is so corruptible. What better way to maintain the system? Thanks for provoking me to think more about this. Looking forward to your thoughts.
Thanks for taking the time to answer my question with such humanity and thoughtfulness. It's enough to make me forget that this is the internet.
As is my way -- and training -- I'll situate myself socially before anything else. I'm the face of the most privileged people on earth: a straight, white, cis-gendered male born in a powerful nation ruled by settlers who look like me. I spent half my life critically ill, and grew up in the "wrong" place (rural and poor), but survived because my motherland (Alberta) just happens to have a huge amount of oil and my father just happens to be a heavy duty mechanic, which enabled him to go from poverty to six figures right around when my illness go serious in my early 20's. I'm trained as a pastor, but churches look at me sideways and some petty nonsense derailed any possibility of plying the trade. My background is in history/sociology. I try to live a conflicted life.
Maybe that's why, after Jesus turned me anarchist as I was waiting to die from illness, I developed an understanding of what liberation means through folk like Howard Thurman. (And by that route I sought to understand the peoples I was "supposed" to hate in the wake of 9/11, which led me to a remarkable group called Palestinians.)
Any prejudice I've ever faced is due to identifying with those who stand with their backs against the wall, as Thurman put it. It's never been because of who I AM. I am incapable of conceiving of what it's like to live every day as an "other" even as I ground myself at the edge of empire. Someone was once so upset with me that they wanted to damage me emotionally, and the worst thing they could come up with to slam my identity was that I don't act sufficiently like a straight, white man. There was no epithet he could use that would have meant anything because I'm the face of privilege. So I don't have the background to grasp, for instance, what it means to have the pressure to be a "High-Achieving Black Woman", which is a term someone explained to me just the other day.
And that's, if I understand you, what you're pointing toward. The pressure to be a "High-Achieving Black Woman" or equivalent was a well-intentioned -- and intentional -- outcome or continuation of the MLK-era struggle. But the system seeks only to perpetuate itself, and bent good intentions and good works to its own ends. Those corruptable enough could then make the claim that they were achieving and rising for the sake of all their people while pulling the ladders up behind them. They could claim to be doing just what their mothers insisted while ignoring the reasons why their mothers made the effort. So identity went from "blessed to be a blessing to others" to "blessed because I deserve it and everyone else can keep their backs against the wall". The result is Cornel West's "black mascot for Wall Street" or your "Black friends". A sincere belief in helping, but a certain amoral careerism that is the same as tearing out an eye. Having eyes and refusing to see is reprehensible, but surely it's okay to sacrifice an eye to render seeing an impossibility.
The only avenue I have available to begin understanding is rural poverty and the Prosperity Gospel that was part of regular force-feeding even on this side of the Canada-US border. That blend goes something like this: Do all the right things so you find God's favour, make us proud, and get rich enough to leave. The obvious problem being that high achievers, whatever that means, are then able to see themselves as superior. Mortals who became demi-gods glowing with divine favour because they were already s'darn perfect. Deserving lords over all the collective failure that is the rotten peasantry. If your back is against the wall and you're mired in concrete, well, you should have pulled those bootstraps to lift them clear and tromp yourself to glorious freedom. Wage class war, but only once you have have enough cash to buy an army.
This isn't unique to rural poverty, of course. The Prosperity Gospel manifests in other forms like positive psychology and "McMindfulness". I tend to see all these things as the same heresy rooted in the state religion, and the uholy antithesis to liberation. Including that of the Black prophetic tradition, to which so many of us owe so very, very much.
Maybe the mulatto formula of the current system is: anyone + a willingness to tear out an eye. Beings who insist they see two kinds of people: winners and losers. And if they can see nothing else from their glorious heights, does anything else exist?
PS: Elon Musk was not born in the US. He could never run for President: just like Arnold Schwarzenegger could not.
Excellent essay. Right on target, and it makes a good point about four more Republican years—although the hidden threat is a VP taking over for an ill or disabled or sedentary oldest President in the US. Like Medicare for all, however, the large majority preferences of the citizens of the US for an end to genocide and an end to militarism and an exorbitant military budget are not about to be supported by a captive congress and senate.
No lies detected. This is all basic human decency. It is indecent to vote for the lowlifes, murderers and thieves we have to choose from. The better spoken the worse.
Very clear analysis! Thank you!
Hope you don’t mind—I just shared to my FaceBook page.
Not at all! Thanks so much!
You are correct.
Thanks, J C!