English and/or imperial language has been "privileged" in its power to colonize and to harm societies. It is exciting to many that "cancel culture" has reached a level of power to create and recreate societies in ways that seem to promise retribution for so many harms done by empire, the State and by supremacists. It is like a dream of the white reactionaries of the 50s (beatniks) 60s (hippies) 70s (counterculturists, utopianists) and 80s (punks). The various sign posts in manicured middle-class lawns stating "Science is real" next to "Love is love" feel like the ultimate manifestation of white trauma bubbling up into arguments that counter-culture should become culture itself, and this will solve our problems.
Indeed, the "Black Lives Matter" movement has a decidedly "white" style and "white" appeal due to its direct acknowledgement and interaction with traditionally "white" culture. It asks us to consume it like an advertising slogan, with much more attached than the hook. Even "Black Lives Matter" Twitter tweeters, Redditors, Snapchatters, WhatsAppists, Tik Tokers, Instagrammers, and Facebook users (the Facebook used?) have contended with the white fragility that snips back "All Lives Matter", and responded with longer statements along the lines of, please forgive clumsy paraphrasing:
Yes, okay, all lives do matter, BUT it's exhausting, oppressive, frustrating and vile (besides horrifying, traumatizing, dehumanizing and more) that we have to keep demanding to be treated like average good people by the systems in place, rather than subhumans, and so it seems we all need reminders that Black Lives Matter.
This discussion, however, is hijacked constantly (probably even quite deliberately at times rather than merely subconsciously) by a media system (and its promulgated culture of colonizing, decolonizing, recolonizing and anything more reactionary than gentle cross-cultural co-creation) that relies on the briefness of communication. The manner in which headlines and ledes and "after the break" cliffhangers have controlled our discussions, arguments and politics for so long makes it vital for news media's lazy manner to allow itself to be hijacked by whatever short quip is stabbing our ears most aggressively.
Personally, the words "Black Lives Matter" sound like music to me. I'm delighted that something so frank and true has gained so much traction and opened so many discussions. I have also heard from people that sound anti-racist that the movement was hijacked and it's being attached to all sorts of things that have nothing to do with the original founders' intentions. "Black Lives Matter" is now stacked on yard signs with curiously and specifically unrelated wording.
Whereas "Science is real" has an effective smack against oppressive religiosity, it is itself a supremacist statement that acts as though Scientism is not the most well-funded velvet glove in publicly available history of the human race, which is itself oppressing and edging out religious views with its iron fist.
Whereas "Love is love" is an effective argument for equal sexual rights, it's also a meaningless neutral statement that avoids where the actual differences in opinion are.
I would love to explore the topics of all lives. I would love to discuss the importance of Black, Indigenous, nomadic, natural, organic, spiritual, animal and vegetables lives mattering too, but it's not right for me to put these things on a metric or argue a particular set of priorities. Clearly, using only the lens of language as a weapon of power (media- academia- or legally-approved interpretations), catch-phrases are not very effective at communicating the nuances we need to bridge philosophical divides.
Certainly, it's cathartic to exercise some overdue "balancing" of power. I have cheered and cried and marched with every radical movement I can participate in. But fighting fire with fire just creates an inferno. I am noticing an exploitation of catharsis that resembles this. Anyway, we can't (and shouldn't) take a movement that doesn't belong to us and try to piggy-back every single trend associated with its most privileged supporters. Besides being rude, it reduces the discussion once more to trending polarities. Nuances are lost all over again. Nuance is something corporate media is really good at pretending to produce exegesis on, with watered down models of conversation between commercial breaks.
For cynics, has that ever been the point, or is the attempt at fitting our views on competing bumper stickers (liberal Northern Sun catalogue gifts versus conservative truck stop souvenirs, all printed in petroleum products) merely a consumerist sport for damaged egos? If we have to admit we are collectively experiencing a species-wide intergenerational trauma, we have to admit we haven't taken the time to process, to heal, to mourn, to face the Sun, to face each other and realize we can do better — and how! Discussion in ourselves and with others takes time and requires concentration and a heavy state of mind that is weighed by the heart.
Maybe these little quips, maxims, jokes, plaques and yard signs are effective in prying open a conversation without the need to overtly risk doing the hard work that some culture has been avoiding: the culture of fanning flames is avoiding the work of putting out fires.
The Good Consumer
Now that more average people are willing to shun, snub, dehumanize, scream at, attack and fight one another (also known as "cancelling" it seems) in order to exercise the power that the media has "granted permission" for, gamblers in government have taken advantage of the explosion of interpersonal conflict. The resulting censorship occurring today is the most expected reaction of private media corporations set up by the psychopathic sportsmen who believe that we believe we need them (when we increasingly, I hope we realize, don't).
Triggering and traumatizing (be it with fear or fanning flames) has always been the propaganda arm's first tool in softening the human population for manipulation. In our present day, it seems to me the unsolved traumas of the population are largely from supremacists of all kinds believing themselves better: police officer over citizen, jail warden over jailed, light skinned over dark skinned, "white" over Indigenous, settler over nomad, homed over homeless, rich over poor, privileged over underprivileged, boss over employee, higher paid employee over lower paid employee, bank-backed over independent, Temple-going over otherly spiritual, tenured over independent researcher, and so on. It seems almost needless to say masked over unmasked, or "believing themselves vaccinated" over "those who do not take experimental pharmaceutical injections", but here we are, in a world where supremacist intolerance has mutated into another strain again. This time, it wears a mask of tolerance over a bad-breathed mouth that mutters cusses at the heathens.
However, the success of the iconoclasts within the supremacist culture — the police officers, jail wardens, light skinned, "white", settler, homed, rich, privileged, boss, higher paid employee, bank-backed, Church-going, tenured society — that is frustrated with its "1%" family now means that even more trauma from these privileged pariahs is spilling out on the already persecuted.
The "traditionally" persecuted — mere survivor, citizen, jailed, dark skinned, Indigenous, nomadic, the homeless, the poor, the underprivileged, the lower paid employees — are being told that these mantras of the rich step-children of the richest can and should be adopted as a means of wresting control from the powers that be. And so the "exciting time" of revolutionaries is at hand all over the media. The richest (and most psychopathic) supremacists have somehow learned to tolerate to some extent, or adapt to, their teenage hippie children that demand their homeless friends are fed. How is that going?
The Good Consumer — not quite homeless but poor citizen nobly supporting the system — has transformed! No longer merely white, male, middle-class, thin, in their 20s and 30s we can see consumers of all ages, shapes, genders, health levels and sizes. It is not acceptable for all, but it is now acceptable for more people to be seen as human as long as they act the way white, male, middle-class, thin people in their 20s and 30s have been acting in recent centuries. And good news — if your oppressed friend who meets only 50% of the traditional criteria of imperial supremacy has a friend that only meets 20% or 10%, well — they too may soon be entered into the Good Consumer category. As for sexual organs, it really doesn't matter. If you can focus your entire frustration with the system at large into your own genitals and what you do with them, all the better. At most, this just affords more opportunity to dehumanize traditional cultures with specific sexual norms and sell a greater amount of products vaguely catered to you. As long as money is generally flowing up to some class of supremacists, the "system" considers you a potentially essential worker. (Not to minimize the hard work of the queer communities, only to point out how conflict and difference are exploited yet again, maybe at the expense of curing us of empire's evils faster.)
And if your mantras and yard signs do nothing to question this (and even better, if they do something to praise and worship it) you may even earn yourself the classification of "essential" for a year at a time, with annual subscription to official social media accounts of entertainment monopolists.
To me, as a mere white, middle-class, thin, male in his 30s, the reaction seems natural. The reaction seems just. I read the December 1972 "hippie" periodical Community Magazine which opens on the topic.
I think, "Okay, we have some language here that's attractive to me. It's reactionary. It's iconoclastic. It's writers trying to be really just here and not give the 'intentional community' movement a free pass." It means I should continue to shut up and to center the voices of people who don't look and act like me, even on a shallow surface judgement of myself. People perpetually getting "cancelled" and "uncancelled" with varying levels of oppression and privilege seems like the natural way for a majority demographic to dissolve. It's been happening for a long time. Probably since empire formed.It's high time for the women to speak - and for men to listen. A commune movement exhibiting all the ugly characteristics of mainstream life on this continent is no alternative.
The voice seems familiar. What were they writing about 50 years ago? Why are (we) people raised to think of themselves (ourselves) as the "normal white folk" that are "better than our ancestor's mistakes" still awakening to this premise through angsty screeds? How long does our emotional reaction to the cries of the oppressed result in mere documentation or writing exercise (such as the above quoted article, or a Wondering Forum post) in scrappy fringe venues for English language? How are corporate media and social media even surviving while attacking and colonizing the most important discussions of our ages — pacifying any given movement with tainted sprinklings of privilege?FLIGHT FROM RESPONSIBILITY
THE NEW SUBURBANITES
By CHRIS ELMS
In the 1940s and 50s white America, hassled by all the
blacks, crime, and decay in the city, took flight to the
suburbs. There they could raise their kids in peace, be sur-
rounded by familiar faces, and forget about the problems of
those less mobile (read: black or lower class) people trapped
in the cities.
Now in the 70s, the white sons and daughters of suburbia,
hassled by polluted cities, empty suburbs, and irrelevant
colleges, are taking flight to the country. Here the new
suburbanites' can raise their kids in peace, be surrounded by
familiar (white) faces and forget about the less mobile
victims trapped in ghettos and pollution (to say nothing of
Vietnamese being bombed out of their rural existence).
This is, in essence, the suburban consciousness: seek a
good life for yourself and forget about the people who have
to live in the problems you've deserted.
"But, we are an Alternative," they cry. And that is true.
Almost all country folk have rejected the consumerism basic
to our society and live much more biologically sane lives.
Those who live communally provide alternatives to the isola-
tion, the competition, the narrow nuclear family, the
acquisitiveness of our materialistic unhuman order. But, by
and large, they are not an alternative to the silence of the
silent majority on the injustices coming down in our prisons
at home or in Vietnam abroad. While the white stockbroker
is too busy hustling his money to take time out to move
against the war, the white communard is too busy working
his garden. While gardening is certainly more laudible than
money grubbing, what bugs me is the common element: both
are white (and not lower class, either) and both are too busy
with their own thing to come to the aid of less privileged
non-whites (or poorer whites).
Racism doesn't have to be intentional. A whole set of
dirty workers (police, teachers, prison guards, social workers)
serves as the buffer hiding the dark races and lower classes
from the innocent lives of new or old suburbia. Yet this
innocence, while not directly harming, does nothing to resist
the oppression, either. To my mind, not opposing injustice
helps that injustice continue.
So with flight to the country. The mobility (to even have
the option) to go live a sane life in the country is a white
(well-to-do) privilege. To cash in on this privilege, while at
the same time turning down one's responsibility to the less-
mobile victims of the system we reject - this seems to me to
smack of the same subtle racism behind the suburban movement.
I would propose listening, deep listening, is taking privileged voices a long ass time to learn — and privilege is like a drug. However much we try to define it as something that cannot be controlled by ourselves, this creates the inevitable counterpoint: it may be controlled by someone who's defined us as an "other". Yes, media too has not yet done its duty to create the safe space in the most privileged platforms available to have (or even model) true honest dialogue between truly diverse view points. Yet, that can only be blamed so much (it can be blamed a lot, to be fair). After all, the Internet and other corporate platforms do create hope as well. I've heard more about this from black, brown, Indigenous, and Asian-American folks than ever before. From women and LGBTQIAA+ individuals, I have heard so much praise of the changes in media that have been hard won. An emotional time is here. We are living in it. And I see a future where cancelling and censorship alone are not the only tools used to slow the march of privilege's armies. Eventually, and it could be very soon, we will recognize that this movement of "better quips" attempting to drown out the "bad old quips" gives way — finally — to some kind of real balance that isn't just emotional reactions to emotional reactions. Tweet versus tweet stops. Trauma responses to trauma finally cease. The bad cycle is broken.
Let's Listen to Each Other Peacefully
This corporate media and social media company-driven movement should not be confused for the actual voices of those who have endured (and/or are enduring) the brunt of the supremacists' persecution. Indeed, while we may need to forgive as much as we can in order to do the important work of processing what's going on lately, I think we need to understand that the search for balance with all ways of life does not end with the establishment of "civil rights" for all Good Consumers. Nor is "cancel culture" — as powerful a reskinning of boycotting as it is — the only (or most effective) way for humans to organize peaceful discussions about tolerance and intolerance.
Humans will still be nomadic sometimes rather than only settlers. Humans will develop and maintain culture, creating relationships with all that is on Earth, and the complex differences in culture will still serve us. Humans will not like being forced to do something, especially against their will. They will retain the joy of freedom to explore human potential in new ways, old ways, and ways that have been explored before but simply forgotten or left unfinished. They will be every color combination humanly possible, and they will look like each other and they will look different from each other. They will be unexpected and expected. They are physical and other-than-physical in ways we may disagree about. They most definitely will be potentially offensive even when they are at their most peaceful, tolerant and wonderful. And perhaps, most weirdly of all, the language they use will constantly change, gain or lose meaning, depending on who is listening. English is a weird one, with so much history of abuse and evil. It seems hard to heal it, but I think healing it is necessary while so many are using it. So, when we cancel a voice, the opportunity to define its value is not just surrendered to supremacists, it is taken from every person who might have gained from interacting with it on a deeper level than merely hearing it repeat the supremacist (or antisupremacist) mantra of the week before being silenced.
Let's all stop shouting at each other, and taking our shit out on each other. Let's use this opportunity to steer English away from becoming nothing but "ammunition", and bring it into a place of healing. With healed language, and using language in healing ways, listening to it will be easier. Hearing and reading it can be an, "Aha, I see." moment instead of it feeling like an attack. Speaking it can be a true gift instead of an argument or manipulation. We can truly transform it from a language of colonization and circuitous triggering each other to a language that is used for healing. Perhaps, it's already happening. Can you read me?