Since the harrowing, soul-crushing Democratic defeat in the 2016 elections (and ever since), liberals have been desperately wracking their beleaguered brains trying to devise a strategy to reclaim any modicum of control before the 2018 election cycle. Triumphantly, they announced their new platform, “A Better Deal: Better Jobs, Better Wages, Better Future,” thinking they had seized upon a guaranteed win. I beg to differ.

The new platform revolves around three principal aims: “(1) Raise the wages and incomes of American workers and create millions of good-paying jobs; (2) Lower the costs of living for families; (3) Build an economy that gives working Americans the tools to succeed in the 21st Century.” In short, their plan is to court white working class voters. The party appears to have assessed its electoral failures to be the result of focusing too much on “identity politics” and framing too many issues in terms of social justice, rather than concentrating on the economic woes of the middle class.

And so, they’ve removed references to race, religion, immigration, gender identity, sexual orientation, sex, even SES/class from the new platform. (Don’t worry, A Better Deal still explicitly promises to “make it a national priority to bring high-speed Internet to every corner of America” though. Y’know, the most urgent matters.)

Now, I’ll readily admit the Democratic establishment’s messaging on economic issues was perhaps subpar during the last election cycle, especially after they worked to push Bernie further and further off stage. But relegating “social justice” issues to some dark, dusty, forgotten corner of the attic until it’s a more convenient time to trot them out? That undermines the most fundamental values the Left purports to swear by.

The Democratic establishment is saying with A Better Deal, “people of color, religious minorities, women, LGBTQIA folk, immigrants, poor people, and other underprivileged communities: we value your vote and agree that you face some challenges in America today. But, please, for the sake of the greater good, we have to put your struggles on the back burner. It’s not that we don’t care, promise, it’s just that your struggles are… divisive. So we’ll focus on white working class concerns for now, and then once we win more elections, we’ll get back to you. Pinky swear, we will. Until then, remember to vote Democrat. K thx, bye.”

Not only does this egregiously belittle and denigrate the continued— and now intolerably heightened— threats to minority and underprivileged communities under the Trump administration, but it actively undermines social justice causes in the most duplicitous repudiation of the Left’s professed desire for a more egalitarian society.

“But wait!” you cry. “Economic justice is social justice! Once we fix growing income inequality, regulate Wall Street, and stop companies from outsourcing American jobs, it will naturally result in better conditions for minorities! And once we appease the white working class, even they will be more amicable to minority concerns!”

Now, I concede there are, for instance, some highly racialized aspects to many of our most pressing economic concerns. We can see it in the way that impoverished communities are disproportionately communities of color and the continuing wage gap. Economic and racial justice are, most certainly, inextricably tied. But economic justice is not enough for racial justice. As Senator Elizabeth Warren said in 2015, calling upon the doctrine of Dr. Martin Luther King, “Economic justice is not — and has never been — sufficient to ensure racial justice. Owning a home won’t stop someone from burning a cross on the front lawn.” Making the argument that just addressing the economy will also solve racism is much the same as claiming that a colorblind worldview will solve racial problems: “if we ignore race, then racial disparities will melt away of their own accord.” But the thing is impoverished people of color face different, unique challenges from impoverished white people (that’s the whole principle of intersectionality, y’all), and if you don’t address the very real effects of compounded inequality you simply cannot achieve a just, egalitarian society.

And that intersectional, inclusive, holistic understanding of egalitarian justice is now more necessary than ever in Trump’s America. Marginalized communities are under attack from all sides; no one’s been spared. From Trump’s deafening silence on hate crimes to his apparent endorsement of police brutality, and from his continued insistence on the Muslim ban to his newly found insistence on the Trans Military ban, one thing is indisputably clear: this is not the time for the Left to distance itself from social justice causes.

Many political scientists and pundits are speculating that the key questions of the 21st century are “who belongs?” and “who is an American?”, and Trump is making it increasingly clear that, for him, women, immigrants, religious minorities, people of color, the poor, and LGBTQIA folk, among others, have no place in his vision of America.

But the thing is, with this Better Deal platform, those communities don’t have much of a place in the Democrats’ vision of America either. Suggesting that the concerns of marginalized communities can wait for a later, more convenient date ignores the aforementioned threats to those communities. And in the meanwhile— while Democrats are focused on “more important things”—  people are literally dying. This whole idea of “waiting until a more convenient time” is antithetical to social progress. It’s not neutral, it’s actively harmful. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” MLK wrote:

“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct-action movement that was ‘well timed’ according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word ‘wait.’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This ‘wait’ has almost always meant ‘never.’ It has been a tranquilizing thalidomide, relieving the emotional stress for a moment, only to give birth to an ill-formed infant of frustration. We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”

And when the Left starts to actively hinder social justice causes like this, it has turned its back on those high and mighty principles of egalitarianism and progressive justice that it has long promised voters. Democrats love scorning the GOP for calling itself the party of “family values,” pointing out all the hypocritical ways the Right then turns its back on those same values. But with this erasure of so many social justice concerns from the Democratic platform, the Left is no better. It has abdicated any semblance of moral high ground it might have once held.

Look, I can understand the desperation behind this new approach. The Left is scrambling to try to present a unified front in the face of its crippling 2016 defeat. I get that. But the Left has also repeatedly turned away every effort to embrace a more progressive agenda in favor of the same establishment views that led to that defeat in the first place. When Hillary beat Bernie in the primaries but then tried to pick up some of his more radical positions to court his voters, the Democratic party should have realized, right then and there, that rather than trying to become a moderate party, it needed to move further left. And yet, when the Democrats had the option of taking that step by selecting Keith Ellison to be party chair, they doubled down on the centrist wishy-washiness and went with Tom Perez. And this Better Deal is more of the same. But the Democrats for whatever reason expect different results. So my sympathy is wearing thin.

Even if we set aside the moral principles that cause me to be viscerally repulsed by this Better Deal, from a purely pragmatic standpoint this platform is not going to hand Democrats electoral victories by winning over white working class voters. It’s not that easy. The Left screwed up in the 2016 cycle when it basically handed that demographic over to the GOP by not opposing Trump’s populist messaging; and creating this milktoast, watered-down version of populist economics after the fact isn’t going to suddenly change that. And, quite frankly, white working class voters aren’t likely to choose this populist vision of economics when the GOP’s is still so potent. As Michelle Cottle wrote in The Atlantic, Trump’s “cruel fantasy, scapegoating certain groups to fuel false hope in others [is] such a soothing, satisfying bedtime story for many Americans that it’s almost irresistible.” Thomas Mann, a senior fellow in governance studies with the Brookings Institution, told Cottle, “the Democrats’ Better Deal can’t compete at a rhetorical level with Trump’s Make America Great Again.” Simply put, A Better Deal isn’t compelling messaging. Without concurrently advocating for things like an end to for-profit private prisons, reproductive health rights, and more grants to help people of color and the poor go to school that would set the Left’s populism apart, the Democratic Better Deal simply can’t compete.

And there’s another reason A Better Deal is very pragmatically setting up the Left to fail: it’s taking minority voters for granted. Under this new platform, voters from marginalized communities feel invisible. Democrats are so sure that the GOP vision of the US is so off-putting that they don’t feel the need to court minority votes at all. Basically, the Democrats are so sure that I won’t risk the ability to see my family overseas again by voting Republican, that they don’t think they need to appeal to me at all. Again, I’ll ask, did the Democrats learn anything from 2016? Remember how Hillary was so sure she would carry Blue states that she didn’t bother visiting a bunch of them? And remember how they went to Trump after that? Just saying the other guy’s worse and then resting on your laurels isn’t guaranteeing victory. I want to vote for something I believe in; I don’t want to vote for the Left just because the other side wants to kill me. Democrats— instead of taking minority votes as a given— need to fear the very real threat that if voters feel like the best they can do is choose the slightly lesser of two evils, then they won’t show up to the ballot box at all. Or they’ll risk it on a third party candidate. The Left has to present a convincing image of a more egalitarian society that will protect the rights of its base and continuously demonstrate its commitment to justice if it wants to retain minority votes.

If Democrats really want to learn from 2016, move forward, and wrest control from Trump and his cronies, they have to do better than A Better Deal. Ignoring social justice concerns in a hypocritical betrayal of their promise for egalitarian justice, offering a pale vision of populist economics, and taking the votes of their base for granted isn’t going to win Democrats more elections. It’s handing the election over to the GOP on a silver platter.

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It’s not all that surprising that a man who began his presidential campaign saying Mexicans were rapists and drug dealers— who then went on to call for a Muslim ban, mock a disabled reporter, select a Vice President who supported gay conversion therapy, claim that bragging about sexual assault was just “locker room talk,” and refuse to decry David Duke— has been capital T Terrible for minorities. I know it shouldn’t shock me at this point, but the alarming depth and breadth of policies Donald Trump has supported that cripple marginalized communities in such a relatively short period of time still astound me.

Those policies are so deep-reaching and ubiquitous at this point, that they’re difficult to keep track of. But we have to stay on top of them in order to actively oppose them. With those hopes, here are 10 ways Trump has hurt minorities, including the blatant bombast and the insidious, lesser-known bigotry.

1. Hate crimes have skyrocketed since the election, and yet Trump remains alarmingly quiet, rarely ever even issuing so much as a tweet in condemnation (in fact, after the latest mosque bombing, White House aide Sebastian Gorka defended Trump’s silence by suggesting the hate crime was a false flag attack).
2. Trump’s policies endanger the LGBTQIA community: he favors banning trans individuals from military service, has withdrawn federal guidance to protect trans students from discrimination, wants to cut funding for researching the cure for HIV/AIDS, and has appointed numerous anti-LGBT activists (like Pence and Gorsuch) to positions of power.
3. His calls to defund Planned Parenthood threaten women’s reproductive health rights, especially low-income women— which has only been compounded by his reinstatement of the global gag rule. And repealing the ACA jeopardizes health care for women, the poor, the elderly, and the sick.
4. Trump’s xenophobic, anti-immigrant rhetoric (such as his recent call to slash legal immigration) has had the chilling effect of silencing undocumented immigrants from reporting crime as well, fearing deportation. He also seeks to slash the U Visa program which historically protected undocumented women who report domestic violence, meaning women now have to decide between silently enduring the abuse or reporting it and potentially facing deportation. (In fact, a spate of immigrant women dropped the cases against their abusers since the election.)
5. Trump has yet to give up on the Muslim Ban, no matter the many constitutional challenges and forced revisions. For now, he seems to have settled on massively slashing the number of refugees fleeing war-torn countries for sanctuary in the US and only allowing travelers from the original 6 banned countries in if they have a “bona fide” relationship in the US (to protect us from Libyan grandparents feeding us until our stomachs burst, of course).
6. Rather than reforming the criminal justice system to more equally protect everyone (not that anyone really thought that was going to happen), the administration’s policies to bring back for-profit private prisons and seemingly bring back the War on Drugs doubles down on some of the most egregious injustices. And let’s not forget Trump’s apparent support for police brutality (which, apart from disproportionately targeting Black folks and men of color, also disproportionately affects the disabled).
7. The administration’s support for cutting Pell Grants and tuition assistance programs would make it more difficult for, in particular, Black students and other students of color to access higher education.
8. Trump really hit the ground running on voter suppression (consider his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity and calls for voter purges), which tends to disproportionately affect people of color and the poor.
9. Even his climate change-denying policies create a system of environmental racism, such as by dismantling programs protecting children from lead poisoning from paint, which Black children are five times more likely to get than white children.
10. The mere fact that he’s surrounded himself with comically villainous, blatantly and despicably bigoted people like Sebastian Gorka, Steven Miller, and Steve Bannon should be enough to terrify us. Add to that the insidious bigotry of people like Mike Pence, John Kelly, and Jeff Sessions— people who can put a thick coating of polished veneer and sugar-coated diplomacy on their homophobia/xenophobia/racism to make the bitter pill supposedly easier to swallow— and the White House has created the perfect maelstrom to turn vicious hate into cold-blooded policy that will continue to cripple marginalized communities for generations to come.

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I had been planning on writing yet another article decrying the afflictive double standard and dog whistle politics of the term “terrorism.” Saturday, thousands of Muslims in Cologne, Germany marched to protest Islamic extremism, and I wanted to express how ineffably tired I am of having to march with a “Love & Unity” sign to prove my humanity/innocence/possession of a heart, but when Muslims are the victims instead of the perpetrators no one has “Love & Unity” with us. But it’s been written again and again and again and again and again.

Then on Sunday, 47 year old Darren Osborne drove a van into a crowd of Muslims leaving Ramadan night prayers at a London mosque, killing at least one person and injuring near a dozen others. Witnesses say Osborne shouted he wanted to “kill all Muslims” and that he did it as retribution “for London Bridge.” The CNN headline read, “London van hits pedestrians in Finsbury Park,” all mentions of the deliberate targeting of Muslims curiously omitted. News outlets lined up pundits to say they “weren’t sure” if it was terrorism or not (no mention of hate crimes either), but they all took a few moments to spout a few glib words on “diversity.” No word yet if Trump will respond by tweeting some blather about his Muslim Ban.

Of the entire incident, what struck me most is that I—  I didn’t react. Other than a frisson of anger at the hypocrisy and a few twangs of grief at lives lost… I feel almost… unperturbed. Logically, I feel where the overwhelming sadness and despondency ought to be— where it has unfailingly been in the past— but none of its symptoms have manifested. Instead, I just feel dispassion. And that worries me. I don’t ever want to be the type of person who shrugs or turns a blind eye to someone’s pain.

But I’m coming to realize this isn’t really the onset of callousness and cold-hearted antipathy. If I feel rather impassive at the moment, it’s not because I’m losing my capacity for empathy, it’s because over the last 6 months or so, I’ve developed a (questionably healthy) defense mechanism to The Era of Trump and realized that sometimes the best thing I can do for my mental health is accept occasional apathy. And I’m also realizing that maybe, just maybe, it’s not peculiar to me— that this defensive quasi-cynicism exists as a sort of distinctive facet of the collective consciousness of people of color (if such a thing exists) post-Trump.

The night of November 8, I remember the insidious feeling of dread creeping over me, slowly giving away to a consumptive panic when I realized it wasn’t just a fluke or a grand karmic joke, it was really happening. The man who began his campaign by saying “Mexicans are rapists,” earned bonus points for calling for the “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” and couldn’t even be stopped by hot mic recordings when he bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy”— that man was going to become the most powerful person in the world. I remember my eyes being glued to the electoral college tallies in the same morbid sort of way you can’t look away from a tragic accident. I remember my brain being a jumble of panic as once-worst-case-scenarios suddenly seemed inevitable, images striking me of my grandparents being unable to return to the country even with Green Cards, of my parents’ citizenship being revoked, of my siblings being rounded up for internment camps. I remember questioning the next morning if I should leave my apartment, afraid what his 60 million voters would now feel emboldened to do. I remember feeling like each and every one of those voters had looked directly at me and told me I didn’t belong in their country, and that knowledge squeezed like rubber bands around my chest so I couldn’t catch a full breath of air or form a coherent sentence. I remember looking at the faces around me that were in various states of terror or denial as each of our private nightmares seemed to come to life, and no amount of hugs stemmed the tears. During lunch I usually worked on law school applications, but I remember that day just staring immobilized at the screen because I couldn’t look that far into the future without drowning in waves of crushing panic again. I remember constantly feeling nauseated and bone weary, unable to eat or sleep for almost a week. I remember waking up every morning in the weeks after, terrified this would be the day a severed pig head, or racist graffiti at the very least, showed up in front of the apartment I shared with another hijabi woman. I remember the only time the panic truly drowned me and I gave into the terror was a little over a week later when there was a suspected hate crime on campus, and the night I found out I remember how I struggled to bring my voice to lower than a shout and how the only words I could formulate were a torrent of curses as I practically yanked my hair out in frustration. I remember vowing never to return to that bone-crushing panic again, and I remember the dispassion taking over ever since.

So if I say that I felt impassive in the face of Sunday’s London attack beyond my angry huffs and frustrated sighs, understand it’s just because at this point I can’t afford to allow something which is, in the grand scheme of things, relatively small to pierce my armor of dispassion. You have to understand that over the last six months I saw hate crimes against Muslims spike after the election to such a level that I was convinced I was next, but I couldn’t summon more than an unaffected shrug at the possibility, adopting an “if it happens, it happens” sort of mentality. I saw a slew of Cabinet positions filled by alt-Right Neo-Nazis, racist conspiracy theorists, and Islamophobes, including one who said Islam is a “vicious cancer inside the body of 1.7 billion people” that had to be “excised,” and all I felt was mild relief the man who called to “exterminate” Muslims wasn’t chosen. I saw a man motivated by extremist far-right views kill 6 people in a Quebec mosque in a shooting rampage, but I couldn’t summon an ounce of surprise it had happened, only that Trudeau condemned it so roundly. I saw a British politician, after the London Bridge Terror Attacks, suggest the internment of Muslims as a solution to extremism, and I couldn’t summon more than a bitter, humorless laugh that that was really the solution he was proposing. For goodness sake, last month a man tried to harass me on the street and yell racial slurs at me as he drove by and, I swear to you— rather than sink into despair as I did a year ago— I just cackled at him, wanting to tell him he’d have to do better than that if he wanted to scare me.

After the grand upset that was Trump’s election, nothing seems to faze me. Since then, I’ve been able to summon copious amounts of anger and disgust— and grief in small doses— at the state of politics, but everything else has succumbed to a void of apathy. Each terrible piece of news has been met with a derisive woosh of air in an indignant exhale, but it all just felt inevitable. It’s the same frustrated, resigned air with which BlackLivesMatter activists greet every failure to indict police officers who shoot unarmed Black men unprovoked. We all expected it. It’s the same fatalistic way Muslims square their shoulders when, despite all their prayers, the gunman turned out to be ISIS-affiliated after all. We all expected it. It’s the same repulsed tone in which anti-deportation attorneys snarl “of course, they did” after they learn ICE tore up yet another family with their raids and forced deportations. We all expected it. It’s not that we don’t care, it’s that if we broke apart after each time the world showed its hostility, there’d be nothing left in us but desolate despair, abject terror, and bottomless grief. And then we wouldn’t be able to make it through the day, let alone work to make anything better.

And I’m not sure how I feel about my realizations about my own dispassion, even if I’m not the only one to retreat behind defensive cynicism lest we bow to panicked despair again. Because at at some level, that despair we’re avoiding is a sign we’re still human, and embracing that grief is a reminder to never turn away from someone’s plight in disconcern. I worry that this dispassion will stunt my capacity for empathy because that’s one thing I never want to lose. But if the dispassion is the only thing keeping depression from crushing shoulders that cannot bear the horrors of the world, I’m loathe to disavow its protection. How else are we to survive the unholy mess that is The Era of Trump?

The post The battle within between dispassion and empathy appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In a few weeks, I turn 20. People keep telling me how young I am— how my life is just beginning. But today I can’t help but feel keenly how old I am— how many more years my life has had than millions of lives do.

How many Syrian refugees died before they had to use both hands to count their age? How many Iraqi, Thai, and Congolese children died soldiers before they lost their baby fat? How many Yemeni and Somali children will waste away of malnutrition without ever learning to walk? How many Afghani and Nigerian girls died giving birth to a child while themselves still children? How many trans teenagers in the United States ended their lives before their adolescence ended?

To them, my life has been eons already. By their metrics, I am ancient. I am acutely conscious of the privileges I have as a fluke of my birth that conspired to keep me alive here today rather than in a grave as small as theirs.

A month ago, Jordan Edwards was shot to death by a police officer in Dallas, TX as he drove away from a party. He was only 15 years old.

I am almost 5 years older than he will ever be. But because my body is not Black and male, here I sit. The number of unarmed Black men killed by police is so incredibly high, it is numbing. The number of lives cut short by police brutality is almost unfathomable. The number of birthdays lost to violence because a Black man’s unarmed body was seen as inherently too dangerous to exist is staggering.

How many unarmed Black boys’ and men’s lives were cut brutally short by police before they even left their teenage years?

• Tamir Rice was killed at age 12 in Cleveland, OH (11/22/2014).
• Tyre King was killed at age 13 in Columbus, OH (9/14/2016).
• Laquan McDonald was killed at age 17 in Chicago, IL (10/20/2014).
• David Joseph was killed at age 17 in Chicago, IL (2/8/2016).
• Michael Brown was killed at age 18 in Ferguson, MO (8/9/2014).
• Paterson Brown was killed at age 18 in Richmond, VA (10/17/2015).
• Tony Robinson was killed at age 19 in Madison, WI (3/6/2015).
• Keith McLeod was killed at age 19 in Reisterstown, MD (9/23/2015).
• Christian Taylor was killed at age 19 in Arlington, TX (8/7/2015).
• Dalvin Hollins was killed at age 19 in Tempe, AZ (7/27/2016).
• Dyzhawn Perkins was killed at age 19 in Buckingham County, VA (2/13/2016).

The number of candles on their birthday cakes will never increase to more than mine. How can I not feel too old?

And in none of these instances will the police officer who cut their lives abruptly short be charged with a crime.

And what about the many lives which existed for only a few years beyond 20?

• Terrance Kellom was killed at age 20 in Detroit, MI (4/27/2015).
• Zamiel Crawford was killed at age 21 in Leeds, AL (6/20/2015).
• Christopher J. Davis was killed at age 21 in Milwaukee, WI (2/24/2016).
• John Crawford was killed at age 22 in Dayton, OH (8/5/2014).
• Christopher Kimble was killed at age 22 in East Cleveland, OH (10/3/2015).
• Vernell Bing, Jr. was killed at age 22 in Jacksonville, FL (5/22/2016).
• Deravis Caine Rogers was killed at age 22 in Atlanta, GA (6/22/2016).
• Levonia Riggins was killed at age 22 in Hillsborough County, FL (8/30/2016).
• Sean Bell was killed at age 23 in Queens, NY (11/25/2006).
• Albert Davis was killed at age 23 in Orlando, FL (7/17/2015).
• Calin Roquemore was killed at age 24 in Longview, TX (2/13/2016).
• Ariel Denkins was killed at age 24 in Raleigh, NC (2/29/2016).
• Kevin Judson was killed at age 24 in McMinnville, OR (7/1/2015).
• Ezell Ford was killed at age 25 in Florence, CA (8/11/2014).
• Freddie Gray was killed at age 25 in Baltimore, MD (4/19/2015).

By a fluke of my birth, I was born into this body in these circumstances in this place with these opportunities and privileges, and so here I sit. But by a fluke of their birth, they weren’t given the same privileges as I was.

And that’s not even counting the thousands— the millions— of people whose lives may not be over, but who through a fluke of their birth were not given the opportunities and privileges by which their lives could flourish.

I just earned my undergraduate degrees; I’m going to law school in the fall. How many people could have been world-class lawyers or doctors or engineers or politicians transforming our society but who weren’t given the opportunity to complete their education? Who were put in underfunded school systems that didn’t have the funds or resources to provide a quality education? Who had to drop out of high school? Who couldn’t afford college tuition? Who are so desperately living paycheck-to- paycheck so their children can one day go to school even though they harbor no hopes of themselves seeing a degree in their name?

When I think about the opportunities I’ve been given in almost 20 years that some people are never given their entire lives, I can’t help but think that perhaps the standards we use to measure if someone’s life is “just beginning” are just lies— cold comfort so we don’t have to think too hard about the way our life could have been if not by a fluke of our birth. And the more I think about those names and those dates, I just remember how old I am. Happy birthday.

The post Happy Birthday appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I just graduated, but as I’ve been reflecting on how it has shaped me, I realized my most important lessons came outside the classroom. [Insert trite aphorism about learning happening everywhere here.] You’d think as a Human Rights and Political Science double-major I’d have spent a lot of time in class digesting social movements, understanding the complexities of justice, and studying to make the world a better place. But you’d be wrong. When I was working on a campus social movement, I even tried to research it. In the end, nothing quite substituted real world experience. These are 20 lessons my BAs didn’t teach me, but I learned anyway.

1. If you think justice is easy, you’re doing it wrong. Look, your tweets and Facebook posts are great, but if that’s all you’re doing while you call yourself a “social justice warrior,” etc., then you’re lying to yourself. Even if you bought yourself a “Nevertheless She Persisted” t-shirt or made a #YesAllWomen tweet or held up a sign at the Women’s March, you can’t call it a day and say you did your part. Justice and resistance are ways of life, not merit badges to earn because you did a thing once.

2. Protesting isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and that’s okay. There’s more than one way to achieve justice. Sometimes people don’t want to be on the front lines, sometimes people can’t risk arrest, sometimes introversion or anxieties or disorders make it difficult or even impossible to protest, and sometimes people just don’t like that method of justice. So long as you don’t give up and you don’t stop, that’s okay. You can still call your Congressmen, educate your communities, distribute informational literature, or volunteer with Planned Parenthood or the ACLU or a social justice organization of your choice. Movements are made by far more than protests, and they need you. Find your niche. (EverydayFeminism has a quiz to find your activist superpower.)

3. Justice— doing something that matters— feels exhausting and excruciating, no matter what form it comes in. Justice comes from incendiary, heart-wrenching, emotion- laden protests. Justice is spontaneous demonstrations organized in a day. Justice is anger, heartbreak, and passion that wrench sobs from your throat and make your chest feel like it’s caving in because it just matters so much. And justice is tedious hours of community organizing. Justice is making signs and stapling packets and attending mind-numbing meetings because the devil is in the details. Justice is researching pages of cold, detached policy briefs and finding loopholes in legislation and still coming up empty so many times that you want to cry in frustration because can’t everyone see that it just matters so much.

4. Self-care isn’t selfish. Justice is exhausting and excruciating, and no one expects you to incessantly place yourself in a position to be tired and pained. In fact, you don’t do your best work when you’re not well-rested and healthy (and emotional health is real health!). Balance self-care with your resistance. Taking a moment to think about yourself and your needs is not selfish. It is necessary, or you will burnout. Do not crucify yourself for the cause, or the movement you’re martyring yourself for will only lose an advocate. In that, self-care is an act of resistance. Feminist Audre Lord said, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

5. Optimism is not the same as naivete. Always have faith people can change, but never blindly count on it. If you don’t retain hope that things will change and you succumb to the seducing pull of cynicism, despair and frustration will eat you alive. Hold tight to your optimistic belief that you can make things better or you’ll lose the motivation to take action.

6. You can be angry. You can be angry. You can be angry. The world is a hostile place, and you can be angry about that. Use that anger to fuel you, channel it into your activism, and sustain yourself on that resultant passion.

7. Do not try to make yourself or your cause palatable. Tone-policing and respectability politics— ways of telling people the means by which they are expressing their demands for justice are too angry, impassioned, or honest to be palatable— suppress movements. When you censor and sanitize your emotions or your cause for the sake of trying to make the general public accept it or side with you, it only serves to (1) shift the blame from the oppressors to the oppressed by blaming their methods of expressing themselves for the continued injustice; (2) make you feel guilty for not protesting “right” (which doesn’t exist BTW); (3) and distance you from your truth. Be honest to your truth. Again, you can be angry. And you can express it.

8. There is a time and place for obedience, but never stop questioning the rules. Law cannot supplant morality. Apartheid, wife-beating, and child slavery were all legal once. And with the protection of the law, they were also given the benediction of morality, sedating the masses from questioning their ethicality. Rather than lazily relying on established rules and laws to dictate our sense of righteousness, we must always question “why?”. Please, read MLK’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Blind obedience to unjust laws allows evil to flourish.

9. History was written by the victors. At the same time as I realized the significance of learning history to understand nuance and context, I also realized that history books venerate at the altar of moral supremacy. The version of history we’ve been taught was propagandized and weaponized with evangelical exceptionalism. It was white-washed, sanitized, and mutilated— designed to anesthetize us with assurances of American ideological purity. Sure, the morality of slavery motivated the Civil War in part, but capitalist economics also played a key role, no? What justifies the U.S. eugenics program or Japanese internment camps but condemns Nazi racial hygiene politics if not an inveterate belief in American infallibility? Read enough American exceptionalism, and you might start to believe it. Believe it long enough, and nothing will ever change.

10. The institutions are not designed for change. The evils and injustices in our country are too foundational to be easily eradicated. When institutions create “open spaces” and “dialogues,” they are trying to convince you they believe as you do, they respect your call for change, and that they are working to fix it. The goal is to create the illusion that by participating in those forums you have done your job to demand justice, so you don’t have to work any harder or more forcefully or more publicly. But if those fora changed anything beyond the superficial rhetoric of the administration— if they actually challenged the existing power dynamics— they wouldn’t offer them up on a silver platter.

11. Honeyed words are cheaper than material action, and it’s always about the money. Just because you’ve been promised change does not mean it will come about. Change often requires material action— and material action costs money and resources. On the other hand, those saccharine promises cost nothing. Do not celebrate your success before you actually see change. The promises were meant to pacify you; don’t let them.

12. The administration was never on your side. They will try to convince you their beliefs and their values coincide with yours, but in the end their interests lie with their continued power, money, and optics. They will give you awards and make promises and give speeches in response to your demands for justice in the community— all to try to assure you they want what you want, too, so you don’t have to push them so hard so publicly. They’ll claim to be “working behind the scenes” or “caught up in some red tape.” Do not let those sweet nothings make you complacent. Their interests are still their own, and if they do somehow coincide, it is because of the public pressure to act. Keep pressuring.

13. Sometimes people hate you; that means you’re doing it right. When you’re trying to change things, you are changing a system and an order that existed for years— maybe decades— so naturally there are going to be some people who don’t like being removed from power or told that the institution they have benefited from for years is wrong. If the people who have benefited from centuries of prejudice or who are resistant to justice dislike what you’re doing, then you are doing it right. If someone isn’t mad at you— if everyone likes you— you have failed to move towards real justice.

14. White liberalism is not a friend to the movement. When I say White liberals, I don’t necessarily mean White people who are liberal. I mean “the white moderate” MLK censures in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” He wrote therein:

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.

Those who are more concerned with the “offense” of being accused of racism rather than the potential harm of their racism are part of the problem. Those who are more concerned with policing methods of protest than challenging the police brutality that necessitated it are part of the problem. Those whose activism can be delayed until it is convenient rather than demanding liberty and justice now are part of the problem.

15. There is always more to learn. Never assume you already understand everything. This is particularly true when talking about allyship. When allies assume they inherently understand the complexities of marginalization— or that they have become experts after reading one book or watching one YouTube video or even obtaining a degree about it— they appropriate the struggles, take up too much space in the movement, and impede the path of justice. Never allow your ego to convince you a little more education wouldn’t be beneficial.

16. Sometimes you are impotent at the hands of someone else’s pain. Trump won, children starved, refugees drowned, and bombs droned on while you held a sign. You felt the burden of the world on your shoulders so you held that sign high, but your sign did not save the world. Humanity dies while we look on. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like we’re accomplishing anything— like our efforts are futile, like we might as well give up. But just because you can’t save everyone doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to save as many as you can. Sometimes there is nothing you can do, but there is not always nothing you can do. Collective surrender enabled the evil you’re protesting in the first place.

17. There is no such thing as amorality. I have a sticker on my laptop quoting Desmond Tutu: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, then you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” It reminds me that neutrality is complicity and silence is violence. As Albert Einstein said, “the world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.” Choose to do something about it.

18. The world is terrible, but never forget there’s always something you can do about it. Schedule a meeting with your administrators to talk about discriminatory policies. Call your Congressperson to make sure they know their constituents won’t look the other way if they pass a bias-motivated law. Volunteer your time or extra money at a local nonprofit like the International Institute or the Kingdom House in STL. Attend a local demonstration for worker’s rights or environmental justice or reproductive health rights. Educate yourself and your community on important sociopolitical issues. One person can make a difference.

19. Empathy can change the world. It is when labels divide and classify us, making the lives of some lesser, that we stop caring about the pain of others. If we see people halfway across the world as valuable and human like us, it becomes far more difficult to turn a blind eye to their suffering. Empathize— reject the idea that the “other” is lesser— and change the world.

20. Justice isn’t a hobby; it’s a lifestyle. It’s choosing to spend your money at minority-owned businesses, reducing your carbon footprint, standing up to prejudiced bullies, making sure diverse voices and interests are heard at the next group meeting, and any of the millions of other small choices people make to improve society. Yes, take every opportunity you can to create radical change when you can, but remember that between those massive undertakings are the everyday actions that shape society, too.

The post What My B.A. Didn’t Teach Me, But I Learned Anyway appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Since at least February, I’ve been making cavalier jokes about how our Supreme Leader Donald Trump may spell the end of American democracy as we know it. But I can do one better than flippant dark humor. No, let’s put my newly-minted Political Science degree to good use because there truly are many potential paths to the downfall of democracy under Adolf Twitler.

Potential Downfall #1: Elite Fracture

Max Fisher and Amanda Taub of the New York Times lay out a theory that the U.S. may be heading down a path towards destabilization similar to what Venezuela has been experiencing since President Nicolás Maduro inherited an economy in shambles which created massive polarization and destabilized the political system. “Elite fracture,” they write, is:

a political science theory that says that while protests matter, the real trigger for regime change is usually when an authoritarian leader loses the support of important elites… Loyalty, it turns out, is basically a collective-action game played by self-interested politicians… [E]lites will most likely abandon a leader if they think that it will leave them better off, and will stay loyal, even in the face of public unrest, if they think that is the best option for them personally.

In other words, if the leader’s loyal base of political elites decides that, in the face of growing political unrest, jumping ship is better for their personal success than the potential rewards they reap with continued loyalty to the leader, the base could fracture into elite infighting. In the U.S., that sort of elite fracture would occur if, as Fisher & Taub propose, Democrats begin to compromise with moderate Republicans, thereby creating a coalition of centrists and leftists opposing only staunch hardline Republicans. If that begins to erode the partisan divide, it also erodes Trump’s base. That makes governing decidedly more difficult. So, if Paul Ryan miraculously regrows a backbone and returns to conservative principles or if Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer reach across the aisle, Trump could see his elite support fracture.

Elite fracture has the potential to create regime change when leaders can no longer govern because of the total loss of support. In the U.S., regime change could come in a democratic form like impeachment, or even in a less seismic form if bipartisan coalitions actively obstruct Trump’s agenda to prevent effective governance. But, regime change can also take the far-less- democratic shape of coups, as in Venezuela, which make the maintenance of democratic institutions difficult to fathom or, at the very least, erodes their integrity. Which leads us to…

Potential Downfall #2: Steady Erosion of Democratic Norms Coupled with the Slow Consolidation of Authoritarian Power

Democracies don’t collapse overnight. Democracies collapse when the integrity of the norms and institutions that maintain them are slowly compromised. Think of Turkey. At one point, the West considered Turkey the pinnacle of democracy in the Middle East— an exemplar to democratize the region. But after years of suppressing dissent and shoring up power, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has “constitutionally” seized increasingly authoritarian levels of power.

Although Erdogan began his presidency trying to bring together disparate political factions create a more stable government, the last several years of his regime have been marked by the vilification and persecution of demographics and political parties opposing him. This was especially noticeable after the failed July 2016 military coup when Erdogan declared a state of military emergency and conducted a massive purge of dissidents, jailing or firing from state sector jobs thousands deemed hostile to his party or its interests. Erdogan also used the purge as an opportunity to blast propaganda and shore up populist, nationalist sentiment, which culminated in the recent referendum converting Turkey’s parliamentary system into a presidential system. That referendum decreased the power of parliament, entirely eliminated the position of the prime minister to consolidate it with that of the president, and also increased the president’s executive and judicial powers; in effect, it expanded presidential authority while simultaneously eroding checks against him.

In other words, the steady erosion of democratic norms and the progressive undermining of democratic institutions allowed the executive to slowly shore up power such that his eventual seizure of dictatorial power seemed like the natural progression of state affairs.

In the U.S., we’ve already seen Trump try to suppress dissent by attacking the media and propagating “alternative facts” and fake news propaganda. We’re also seeing Trump undermine democratic norms and attempt to erode checks against him as he repeatedly attacks the legitimacy of the judiciary when it rules against him; spoken— well, tweeted— out against protesters; seemingly encouraged nepotism; argued loyalty takes precedence over competence when making appointments; and fired the man heading the independent investigation into the legitimacy and legality of Trump’s election when it threatened his position. These are not necessarily illegal acts, but they are also not acts which coexist with liberal democracy because they violate fundamental democratic norms. And democracy is held up as much by democratic institutions as it is by the integrity of democratic norms. Neither can exist without the other, and right now Trump is seriously testing the strength of those norms. If we see a crisis as Turkey did, that could give Trump the opportunity to declare a state of emergency, consolidate power, and also undermine those democratic institutions. Which leads me to…

Potential Downfall #3: A Crisis and a State of Emergency Give the Executive Unprecedented Power

During times of emergency, the nation looks to the leader to steer it out of the crisis. We’ve seen repeatedly in the U.S. the expansion of presidential authority during crises: it happened when FDR brought the country out of the Great Depression and when George W. Bush took the country to war after 9/11. And, of course, we’ve also seen it happen abroad, as in Turkey. An even more potent— if perhaps somewhat extreme— example exists in the fall of the Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany.

After WWI, Germany became the Weimar Republic— a parliamentary democracy with a president and chancellor. For some time, the government was stable, but increased economic turbulence created widespread discontent and partisanship that pushed the electorate to increasingly extremist parties. The discontent resulted in highly disparate political parties and unstable coalitions where no party held a majority in parliament. To prevent an imminent coup and finally create a legislative majority, President Paul von Hindenburg was forced to appoint Hitler— a member of the extremist opposition party— as Chancellor. But when Hindenburg died in office, Hitler appointed himself president without an election. And soon after, when the Reichstag— the parliament building— burned down, Hitler blamed the communist opposition, declared a state of emergency and seized dictatorial powers for himself. The following several years immersed the country in racist propaganda and discriminatory legislation, obliterated civil liberties, imprisoned political dissenters, began to create a police state, and established the first concentration camps.

The catalyst for all of that change, though, was the crisis of the Reichstag fire when Hitler convinced the populace that it was under attack by violent extremists. If the U.S. experiences a major crisis, the executive can similarly use it as a means of justifying the consolidation of extreme power, especially when it comes on the heels of deep political unrest. Coupling that power with the suppression of dissent and extreme nationalism (some of which we’re already seeing)— or, even more dangerously, the aforementioned erosion of democratic norms— can spell the downfall of democratic governance in favor of authoritarian rule. (Remember that poster in the Holocaust Museum on the warning signs of fascism that went viral a few months back?) Consider what would happen if we experienced a large-scale terrorist attack, if there was a violent plot against elected officials, or even if there was a major economic collapse. A crisis on that scale would give a power-hungry executive all the opportunity necessary to seize dictatorial control.

Potential Downfall #4: Populism leads to “Authoritarianization” and One of the Potential Downfalls #1-3

Populism may be the most worrisome of the potential downfalls in that its insidiousness paves the way for any of Potential Downfalls #1-3 to become more likely. In fact, studies indicate populist-fueled authoritarianization is the most common downfall of democracy into autocracy. It has been the case with Erdogan in Turkey, Duterte in the Philippines, Chávez (and somewhat Maduro) in Venezuela, and Putin in Russia. In each case, what began with a wave of populist sentiments set the country down a path that ultimately ended in authoritarianism. We have also seen the rise of populist movements with Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Marine Le Pen in France, and Nigel Farage of Brexit in the UK, and even though none of these movements elected a populist national executive, their existence itself is cause for concern when we consider the potential consequences of populism.

Populist tides tend to put loyalists and elites in positions of power, regardless of competence; stifle a free press in favor of messaging from the government; cultivate a cult of personality around their leader; stoke partisanship to create a clear us-versus-them divide; encourage xenophobia, extreme nationalism, and an exclusive, often racist, vision of the nation; and use litigation and legislation to silence opposition in civil society. And in the case of populism electing our Dear Leader Trump, we have Betsy DeVos and Jared Kushner, every speech/interview that weirdly became about his electoral victory, the use of “liberal snowflake” as a slur, the Muslim Ban and border wall with Mexico, and the woman convicted guilty of laughing at Jeff Sessions.

Many of these side-effects of populism are aforementioned symptoms of Potential Downfalls #1-3. The concern becomes keeping populism at the level of skewing liberal democracy in the U.S. through a far-right party and deep partisanship— a curable problem— rather than allowing it to putrefy the foundations of democracy.

Potential Salvation: Democratic Norms and Institutions, Once Put to the Test, May Be Stronger than they Appear

Certainly, it appears that we have begun a steady backslide into authoritarianism and that there are many potential avenues for the downfall of our democracy as we know it, but let us also keep in mind that our democratic norms and institutions have proven resilient thus far. Our governmental process is meant to be slow to change and it is meant to resist radical departures from precedent.

When FDR’s court-packing plan threatened the independence of the judiciary, democratic norms rebalanced the situation. When McCarthyism threatened the vibrancy of the political community, again the system righted itself. Even under Trump, we have seen the judiciary repeatedly stymie his attempts to shore up executive power (such as with the Muslim Ban). It seems possible, then, that our democracy is more resilient than perhaps we give it credit and that none of these downfalls are probable, merely possible.

We cannot simply have faith the system will work as it has before to rebalance itself, though; we need to be vigilant watchdogs, activists, and advocates making sure that if/when we see the warning signs of Potential Downfalls #1-4 we speak up and we act. The maintenance of a democracy is an active process that requires continuous engagement with the system. We must demand accountability from our representatives, work from within the system to prop it up and agitate outside the system to ensure that legal system actors represent our interests, and continue to be vigilant for signs that our democracy is being undermined. Unless we want the Cheeto-in-Chief to become an unchecked leader, we need to understand the many threats to our democracy and then refuse to allow them to come to fruition.

The post The Many Threats to Democracy under Trump appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I distinctly remember as a child once telling my mother I was divided into “half Muslim and half American,” as if there was no overlap. My mother, understandably, was horrified, but I couldn’t understand why. It made sense to me. I couldn’t have been older than 6 or 7 years old, so it must have been around 2003. The pain of 9/11 was still a raw, open wound in the American psyche, and it colored my perception of society, even though I wasn’t even school-aged when those hijacked planes brought down generations’ of hopes and dreams alongside the towers. Because of it, I internalized the message I was hearing from the world that in order to be a real American, I had to be White and Christian; being neither of those things, I felt I had to compartmentalize my supposedly mutually exclusive identities. And so I spent years trying to make myself palatable by erasing my Muslimness and shunning my Pakistani heritage in the hopes of becoming worthy of belonging. Foolish. As if I don’t forever wear those pieces of me in my very skin.

Today several years wiser, I have come to embrace my hyphenated identity as Muslim-American, even when the reservations on my complete Americanness rub me raw. And I have realized I am worthy as I am— whole and unapologetically me. They are both irrevocably components of my identity and, rather than foregoing either, I’ve dedicated myself to carving a niche in my community for the burden of that hyphen. To some extent, I didn’t have much of a choice. Hating a part of yourself you can’t change because of what other people say isn’t exactly good for your self image. Besides, somewhere along the way I decided to become a hijabi and, if there’s anything that can break a desire to be more palatable, it’s choosing to go out every day in a scarf that literally makes some people want to kill me.

But old habits die hard, and I can’t entirely shake the idea I wasn’t necessarily wrong to think like that when, to this day, that’s how the world sees me. I’m too Muslim/Brown/Pakistani to be American, and too American to be Muslim/Brown/Pakistani. Can I belong?

And the one idea that underscores the cause of all of this— the reason this is something I have to struggle with in the first place— is a lack of representation. The idea I am some mystical creature playing a tug-of-war with parts of my identity for the right to exist comes from the fact that everywhere I look, Muslims are portrayed one way and Americans are portrayed another, and there is a vast, seemingly insurmountable chasm in between those two representations.

When we think of Americans they are White, Christians (and usually men). But the only time I see someone who looks like me on screen, they are either (a) terrorists, (b) apologists, or (c) casualties. The bomber whose face everyone has been texted to be on the lookout for could be my brother; the man on screen reminding the world that the terrorist does not represent Islam and apologizing on behalf of the Muslim community could be my father; the children ravaged by war in Syria or savaged by a drone strike in Afghanistan could be my sister or cousin. But never a positive representation in America. No, people who look like me only show up in the context of a crime. No wonder I grew up thinking there wasn’t space for me.

Even though I know better, the challenges of internalized underrepresentation and misrepresentation still plague me. I’m currently applying to law schools, but a year ago I had ruled it out from my possible postgraduate future. Noting that poverty exacerbates most other social justice concerns, the idea of working on civil rights issues pro bono had called to me. But a nagging concern stopped me short. What if, because of the way I look— because I am a hijabi— a jury would deny justice to my client? What if the judge took an immediate dislike to whomever I was representing because they couldn’t overcome the way I looked? What if someone else suffered despite the purity of my motivations merely because my appearance was an obstacle to their chance at justice?

In other words, the idea of identity-imposed restrictions held me back— the idea that because of the way I look, there are certain things to which I can never aspire. No one ever said it to my face, but I inferred it from my society. You can’t be what you can’t see. I’ve never seen a hijabi attorney in the United States before— in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran, certainly, but never the United States. Perhaps this was why. So for a long while I abandoned the idea and resigned myself to a future working with an NGO or nonprofit where, so long as I was behind the scenes, my appearance could cause no one harm.

Recently, though I’ve decided I was being dumb. Those restrictions didn’t really come from the nature of my identity, but from me. I can’t subvert myself out of fear or cynicism or what-ifs; I’m just going to have to hold a little tighter to my faith in humanity. And in no small part, my about-face is because I want to change the system. I didn’t have role models to convince me I’m not crazy to aspire to this, but perhaps my story can convince someone else their dreams aren’t unattainable. That their hopes are valid. If I surrender to “this is just the way things are,” then who brings about “the way things should be”? Someone’s got to do it. And I’m too stubborn to give up.

On the flip side of the same coin, representation is also the catalyst for profound microcosmic change. Representation inherently carries the potential to empower. A few weeks ago, I bought Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age on a whim, being an avid fan of muslimgirl.com. And although Amani Al-Khatahtbeh is a Jordanian-Palestinian-American Jersey girl, and I’m a Pakistani-American Midwesterner a few years younger, I was astonished to see pieces of my story in the pages of her’s. As a child, I craved books with protagonists that looked like me, and I remember reading even the most bland and uninspiring things simply because one character had a vaguely “ethnic” name. And now there’s an entire book— a gorgeously written, candid memoir— that reflects pieces of me?!? I sent a series of incredulous messages to a friend, “I have never ever felt like my thoughts were written by somebody else’s hand. (She even likes lists!) Wow, the power of representation. Is this how most people feel when they just read most books?”

Immediately after I finished it the first time, I picked it right back up and began again. I was just so amazed to see experiences that so closely mirrored mine validated in black and white right there in front of me. She talked about respectability politics and the burden of representation as the Token Muslim Girl; I have struggled with that.

She talked about the challenges of first-generation Americans to straddle the lines of a hyphenated identity the world tells you is mutually exclusive and her perpetual frustration with the pathetic “where are you from” question; I have written these words.

She talked about when in elementary school the insults lobbed at her distinctly shifted to be racial slurs about “her people” and how she got the student suspended when she told the teacher; I was in the fifth grade the first time I had a student suspended for his racism.

She talked about the feelings of inherent inferiority that plagued her childhood as a girl of color and how difficult it was because of it to convince herself she was allowed to take up space; I intimately know that self-doubt.

She talked about those who try to challenge her feminist identity by claiming her status as a hijabi invalidates her quest for women’s empowerment; I fight that battle.

She talked about the constant vigilance as a visibly-Muslim hijabi that keeps her from saying certain phrases too loudly in public or standing too close to the train tracks; I self-monitor like that, too.

She talked about her infuriated exhaustion at having to asserting her humanity time and time again after each terrorist attack simply because she is Muslim; I know that anger.

She talked about how she was labelled “abrasive” when she, as a woman of color, spoke up too loudly for what she believed in; I wear that label.

She talked about the challenge of forcing White America to confront the pervasiveness of racism— even when people of color have never been able to turn away from that depravity— in the context of Brexit and Trump’s GOP nomination; I wrote that in the context of Trump’s election.

I still can’t get over the power of that book to validate what I feel, even though I spend hours telling other people time and time again what they experience is valid. I know it, but seeing it written in my hands helped me internalize it.

And there are thousands of stories other than these about the power of representation. Representation is the story of the Mexican-American father who was irrepressibly happy because in Rogue One, Diego Luna’s character unabashedly has a heavy accent like his and was still portrayed as an average person, not a caricature. Representation is the story of an excited young Whoopi Goldberg who saw a Black woman on Star Trek who wasn’t a maid and said “I knew right then and there I could be anything I wanted to be.” Representation is the story of the beaming little girl who saw the protagonist in Home had dark skin and hair like hers and the adoring girl empowered by the all-female cast of Ghostbusters. Representation is the story of the now-iconic image of the little boy astonished to find the president’s hair felt just like his. Representation is the story of how a mere visit from Michelle Obama to a girl’s school seems to have boosted their tested scores as they realized “She made it. And so can we.”

I can’t help but think representation is one of those foundational issues that, once resolved, can affect change in so many areas. Imagine it. If when we looked around— at the media, at politics, at our neighborhoods— and saw people who looked like us looking back, stigmas could slowly disappear in the face of diverse narratives that portrayed people as humans, not labels. Without those stigmas, prejudice would lighten. With diverse narratives readily available, the burden of representation would ease. Having role models would help to ensure no child’s dreams were stunted by hopelessness or cynicism. Representation matters.

As I scrawled inside my copy of Muslim Girl, representation “is the difference between knowing at a rational level that I’m not crazy for what I think and how I feel, and KNOWING deep inside me that I’m not crazy in the least. I’m not alone. And representation is the light at the end of the tunnel that, if she could do it, maybe I’ll survive all this and succeed after all. This is the power of representation to inspire hope.”

The post Muslim women and the power of representation appeared first on Occasional Planet.

For me, 2017 has been marred with the knowledge that  it ushers in the era of Trump. The incoming administration has promised to push policies that slash rights for many already marginalized communities, ranging from the poor to women, to religious minorities, to the LGBTQ+ community, to people with disabilities, to immigrants, among others.

With inauguration day rapidly approaching, people are, legitimately and justifiably, terrified. As a Muslim American woman from a family of immigrants, I count myself among those battling to keep panic at bay as I contemplate the Trump administration. And on behalf of my closest friends and larger community, who are vulnerable as members of other marginalized groups, I am doubly scared.

So for me, 2017 means that now, more than ever, we all have the duty to be better citizens. We each have a duty to engage with our communities and get involved to every extent possible, if we want to roll back policies that will hurt us and those we care about. I don’t have any New Year’s Resolutions, but I do have these very pointed intentions to do whatever I can in the year ahead to make sure that my community does not suffer from a Trump presidency.

Hold politicians accountable

 Elected officials’ job is to represent us. Admittedly, the system doesn’t always work that way, and we often feel like our will is not being represented within our government. But it is our responsibility to persist. If we refuse to even try to hold our elected officials accountable at every level of government— local, state, and national— what’s to change the system? It is our responsibility to call our legislators, email them, show up at their offices and demand accountability. When a critical bill needs to pass (or get shut down), if we’re not out there demanding someone listen, then we can’t be the ones complaining later that it didn’t work out how we wanted. We are all responsible for holding our government accountable, and you can bet that I am going to do better keeping in contact with my elected officials and making my voice heard.

Allies, live your beliefs

Politicians aren’t the only ones who need to be held accountable. The past several months have seen a massive upsurge in legitimized hatred and bigotry, and we have to hold ourselves and each other accountable for fighting it. That means that right now, allies need to step up their game. All of us have some privilege, which means we all have the potential to be allies to a community that needs our support. Privilege is a responsibility to change the system. Privilege is a responsibility to call out our coworkers, friends, and family when their behavior is anywhere on the continuum from micro-aggressive to flat-out bigoted. Privilege is a responsibility to do better ourselves and to ensure we’re not reifying prejudiced systems. Privilege is a responsibility to shut shit down. And I’m going to take it very seriously.

Humanize the “other”

There are people different from us within American society: Learn about them. When we start to see people who are different from us as people rather than just as different, our world view shifts. Try checking out these books on the lives of people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, people with disabilities, immigrants, women, and people in poverty. It’s really easy to think we understand the struggles of another community, claim credentials about having a diverse friend, or just assume we already know enough, but there’s always more to learn. I’m going to try even harder to branch out this year and consume information from a wider array of sources, read more books from more authors, and connect with as many people from as many backgrounds as I can.

We are responsible for knowing the truth

Nothing will change if we aren’t informed about what’s happening around us. Fake news is abundant, and Facebook is really not how we should be learning about the world. We can’t blame anything but our own laziness for misinformation. There are abundant resources out there. I intend to ensure that I am constantly cross-checking my facts, finding reliable sources, and spreading the truth.

America is not the center of the universe

We live in an increasingly interconnected world, and if we only know what’s happening in the US, we’re missing out on a vast wealth of information. What happens halfway across the world most definitely affects us in the middle of the country, so I’m going to make sure I don’t skimp on the world news. (P.S. It’s also helpful to get information from sources based outside of the US because more perspectives are always critical to a better understanding of an issue. BBC and Al Jazeera are often favorites.)

Get involved

Yes, issues of inequality exist at the institutional level, but they impact people at the personal level, and there are abundant opportunities to do something. Protesting isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but there are plenty of other ways to make a difference. I’m going to make more time to volunteer within my community to make people’s lives better (and hopefully still attend rallies and marches, too). These are a small selection of St. Louis organizations you might consider helping:

• International Institute (support and resources for immigrants)
• Planned Parenthood (women’s rights and reproductive health are their main focus, but they also do work on labor rights, race issues, poverty, and a vast number of other issues)
• CAIR-STL (representation for Muslim Americans)
• Kingdom House (providing resources for low-income families)
• Women’s Safe House (domestic violence shelter)
• Employment Connection (providing the homeless, ex-offenders, and immigrants among others employment opportunities to pull them out of poverty)
• National Alliance on Mental Illness (nationwide coalition to provide advocacy for individuals with mental disorders and their families)
• Growing American Youth (support for LGBT youth)
• St. Louis Homeless Winter Outreach (groups of volunteers providing resources and rides to shelters for homeless individuals on nights the temperature drops below 20 degrees)
• ACLU (civil rights advocacy)

This is only a brief introduction to efforts we all need to collectively undertake to protect ourselves and our communities. A lot of us were left wondering after the election how this possibly came to be, and if we want to stop this from happening again then we have to make a change.

Let’s get to work.

The post How to be a better, more active citizen in the Trump era appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Dear White liberals: I’ve heard that this 2016 election really hit you hard. That it was a “wake-up call.” You’ve told me “I never knew there was so much racism in this country.” or “I didn’t realize that so many Americans were so prejudiced.” or “Before this election, I just—- I just didn’t know.”

White liberals in particular are suddenly being forced to engage with the racist underbelly of the U.S. and realize that it’s not nearly as remote or difficult to find as we wanted to delude ourselves. We just didn’t want to peel back the flimsy translucent layer that was hiding it and check. But it’s always been there, poised to oppress and destroy.

White liberals who consider themselves to be entirely non-racist now have to suffer through stunted conversations over the turkey at Thanksgiving and sit rigidly straight-backed on the edge of their chairs during the awkward lulls of silence over Christmas dinner. My racist uncle voted for Trump? My uncle? Oh. Well. Um. What do we even talk about now? I have Black/Brown friends! How can I engage with a Trump supporter? Do I educate him? Do I try to explain privilege and oppression to him? But it’s just so darn exhausting to beat yourself against a brick wall of bigotry! I’m just so tired of trying to point out racism to racists, y’know? They don’t get it, and all it does is make me sad and frustrated. Y’know what, no, I can’t keep doing this to myself; we’re just going to ban politics talk. We’re just not going to talk about Trump.

It sounds terrible, but when I hear scores of people tell me that story, I just can’t help but laugh. Welcome to my life. To me, that story sounds like it is a tiny soundbite from the life of a person of color (PoC), but still very clearly retold by a White person. Let me explain.

After Trump’s election, White liberal teachers are being forced to teach their racist students, and stomach listening to that virulence in the face of their beliefs because “First Amendment rights!” White liberal neighbors are reconsidering the idle chitchat they make with the parents down the street who carpool to take their kids to school because “but they have a Trump sign in their lawn.” White liberals whose coworkers have “All Lives Matter” on their Facebook wall now have to look across the row of cubicles and wonder if their coworker is a rabid Trump-level racist or just a diet racist (and “what are the conversations in the break room going to sound like now?”).

White liberals are being forced to engage in political conversations that aren’t just contentious, but that actively doubt the intellect and humanity of the participants. And even more painfully, White liberals have to make the decision between whether they are going to call out their family/friends/neighbors/coworkers on their bigotry and potentially burn that bridge through an arduous and mentally/emotionally demanding dialogue, or if they have to value that relationship “in spite of” the racism and xenophobia and just overlook it.

What I need you to know, my White liberal friends, is that the struggle you’re experiencing right now? That struggle to confront bigotry amongst your friends and coworkers? That indecision between educating them and just saving your own piece of mind? That regret at unearthing the fact that your longtime friend is actually a Trump supporter even though you would have been much happier not knowing? That, my friends? That is just a tiny bit of the internal monologue that flows through the mind of a PoC on a daily basis.

From the time we get up in the morning to the moment we fall asleep, we struggle with the weight of the knowledge that there are racists in the world who don’t believe in our complete humanity, and we can’t cut ourselves off from those people. They will always be part of our life. PoC every single day from birth on have been living that struggle. And now you get to live a tiny bit of it.

Except you can disengage. That’s privilege. When it’s too much for you to handle— and we all get to that point when we just need to take care of ourselves first and foremost (and that’s 100% valid and absolutely crucial)— you have the ability to decide you don’t want to have these conversations anymore. You can decide this isn’t the time, and stop.

But I can’t abandon my skin. I can’t just leave it at home today. Short of isolating myself in my room and cutting myself off from the entire world, I can’t turn that part of my life off when I want to.

I will always, without reprieve, be forced to wonder if that off-color remark was racist or just a poorly thought out joke that wasn’t ill-intentioned. And then I will always have to wonder how poorly thought out a joke has to be to qualify as needing to be confronted. I will always, when faced with the umpteenth stupid remark of the day, have to decide if I can really mentally and physically afford to confront it— if I have the emotional energy in me to paste on a happy face over my furious indignation and educate someone who appears to have little to no desire to be educated— or if I’m just too exhausted to do it today again. I will always have to reconsider if it is safe for me to speak and share my opinions in a space, not because it might lose me Facebook friends, but because literal harm might come of it.

And it never ends. Ever.

So this struggle you’re facing is difficult, I know, but it’s only a small portion— a heavily diluted portion— of what PoC experience daily. And you can suspend it at any point in time.

It’s difficult— no, it’s absolutely do-I-have-to-get-out-of-bed-today crippling sometimes— to confront bigotry like that on a daily basis. And many White liberals don’t exactly have a lot of experience with that so, I understand, it’s even more mind-bendingly difficult. I understand. And I am not in any way discounting the level of pain that sort of uphill battle causes.

But what I need you to understand is that if the 2016 presidential election has complicated your life, it has made the life of many PoC treacherous. This is not a time we can indulge in fragility. If you’re feeling inconvenienced by the results of the election, I’m sorry, but get over it.

Now, more than ever, PoC need you to stand up for what you believe in, even when it’s difficult. Especially when it’s difficult. Because a conversation that is difficult for you to have may be dangerous for your Black/Brown friend to have. Hate crimes are up, terrifyingly so, and that means situations that are uncomfortable for White liberals are potentially threatening for PoC.

And I also need you to understand that we can’t afford to just cut Trump supporters out of our lives, anyway. They are still a massive chunk of American society. Ignoring and silencing them is what got us to this position to begin with. Clearly, it’s not working. These are conversations we have to be having. If we aren’t engaging with White working class America and the message they’re getting from the news media and politics is that their problems aren’t being addressed because of Black and Brown Americans, then we haven’t solved a single problem. Not a single one. Actually, we’ve made it worse. We’ve handed Trump and his cronies that base of supporters on a silver platter. If you’re really worried about your Black/Brown friends, this is how you do it. Engage.

For you this was a wake-up call that the U.S. is still seethingly and unapologetically racist, but PoC never managed to forget.

If you consider yourself a non-racist, this is the time to show it. This is the time to live it.

P.S. If you want to hear this sort of message a little more comedically, enjoy this video from Late Night with Seth Myers:

The post Dear white liberals freaked out by the election: Welcome to my world appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I’ll admit, most terrorism/spy/war/national defense movies of the past decade anger me for a dozen or so different reasons, not the least of which is because they frequently draw on Islamophobia, xenophobia, racism, fear-mongering, misogyny, etc. to advance their messages (that sounds rather like a certain political candidate we know, doesn’t it?). But London Has Fallen goes beyond the pale to be exceedingly irksome.

The movie was released earlier this year and stars Gerard Butler as Mike Banning, a Secret Service agent, protecting President Benjamin Asher (played by Aaron Eckhart). It takes place during a massive terror campaign in London waged by Pakistani arms dealer and terrorist ringleader Aamir Barkawi (Alon Moni Aboutboul).  Back in the United States, Vice President Allan Trumbull (Morgan Freeman) runs the White House to try to extract Banning and Asher from the war zone that is now London.

The movie begins with Barkawi’s daughter’s wedding, where an American spy informs the US intelligence community that Barkawi is present at the ceremony (alongside hundreds of innocent civilian wedding guests), leading the US to launch a drone strike against the wedding party to kill Barkawi and his family. Barkawi does not die in the strike, however, and over the next two years begins to plan his revenge and gather recruits. He begins his retributive terror campaign by assassinating the British Prime Minister to force the leaders of the Western world to arrive in London and then proceeds to bomb, shoot, and bludgeon all but President Asher to a most violent death. Asher escapes purely as a result of Banning’s cunning and the foolhardy mistakes of his terrorist adversaries. By the end of the movie, naturally, the Americans live (while the British, French, Italian, Japanese, and numerous other delegations and respective security details all die) and Banning kills Barkawi, single-handedly, bringing down the entire terrorist network.

How I abhor it? Let me count the ways.

First, and this isn’t sociopolitical at all: Gerard Butler’s character is insufferable. He is an unrepentant, pretentious, uber-aggressive, unlikeable jerk face twit of a bossypants, and I could not stand him. He insinuates himself into a leadership position in every situation, insulting and battering his way to the top, even when he has no claim to command. His disagreeableness had me grimacing through most of the movie, although that could also be attributed to almost everything else about it.

Two:  the entire movie is American Exceptionalism at its finest. There is the obvious glorification of America and Americans as better than everyone else when this one secret service agent outsmarts the hundreds of terrorists who, by the way, succeeded in killing every single other protection detail. Gerard Butler alone kills upwards of 40 terrorists by knifing or shooting them and then blows up another 50 plus terrorists, but none of the hundreds of brown terrorists even scratch him. He leaves the entire debacle unscathed. American Exceptionalism also asserts itself in the sense that the scope of the movie narrows from the mass attacks that shake London and the world to merely protecting two Americans, which really goes to show the American disposition about world affairs.

Three, Muslim terrorists AGAIN. I could almost get over this point because I know that’s just how the national psyche works. and radical ISIS-like terrorists sells right now in Hollywood, but in London Has Fallen that devolves into xenophobic blanket statements. Case in point: When Banning screams at Barkawi over the walkie-talkie of Barkawi’s now-tortured and dead son: “Why don’t you go back to Fuck-head-istan or wherever you’re from?!” Allow me to enlighten you, Mr. Banning, no such place as “Fuck-head-istan” exists. I mean there’s Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan… but no “Fuck-head.” How curious. And even if “Fuck-head-istan” did exist, all of the “stan”s are incredibly different from one another, so “wherever you’re from” as a grouping for a wide variety of Central and South Asian countries sounds a bit haphazard and indiscriminate, wouldn’t you say? I will also add that although you continue to refer to Pakistani and “Fuck-head-istani” terrorists as Arab, Central/South Asians are not Arabs.

Also, the “Pakistanis” in the movie aren’t Pakistani, they just used random Brown people. The actor who plays Barkawi, the head antagonist, is Israeli; another is Belgian-Tunisian, French-Tunisian, Indian, etc. Not Pakistani. Actually, they don’t even use Pakistani names or places in the film. That just serves to further the idea that all Brown/Muslim/Arab people are interchangeable and Hollywood. and/or Americans have no need to draw lines of difference between anyone in that very diverse group. Which is reprehensible and obnoxious. Maybe it’s just because they couldn’t find “Fuck-head-istan” on the map.

The idea of making the Brown terrorists faceless semi-humans is furthered by the absolute lack of remorse for the civilians killed in the drone strike in Pakistan. A small modicum of regret shines through when President Asher realizes Barkawi is bent on avenging his family because of an American slaughter. But Banning dissuades Asher of the idea that Asher has any responsibility or should feel any guilt for what is happening, although they both continue to consider the devastation of London a travesty.

Basically, the premise of the film is that Americans bombed innocent civilians in shopping malls and weddings for the sake of killing one target, and Barkawi turns around and does the exact same thing in London. But the Westerners don’t even attempt to understand that senseless retributive violence, preferring to continuously and constantly dismiss it as “insanity.” When Americans do it, it’s justice and national security; when terrorists do it, it’s murder and insane.

Number seven: I can almost understand– almost– the unrepentant, unhesitating murder of every terrorist Banning sees, but there is no regard for the innocent civilian casualties in London either. Which is particularly telling considering that’s what got you in this mess to begin with.

Eight: lack of regard for human life isn’t just an accidental side effect, but a welcomed and encouraged trait fostered in “the good guys.” When one of the main terrorist organizers in London hesitates a moment to behead President Asher live on television, the film paints it as a sign of weakness. When Banning tortures a terrorist he has already shot for the sake of torturing a man and makes his brother listen to the torture, it is a quality of his good character, strength, and adept skills as a Secret Service Agent.

Nine: At the end of the movie, the answer to the problem created by a drone strike is “solved” by a drone strike, when America finally succeeds in bombing Barkawi. Vice President Trumbull announces that “There are those who say that none of this would have happened if we just minded our own business. [They are wrong.] We owe it to our children and grandchildren to engage with the world.” I’m not sure that bombing, slaughtering, and destroying is quite what most people have in mind when they say “engage,” but I’m not a politician, so what do I know?

Finally, this movie is an explosion of testosterone-fueled aggression and most certainly does not pass the Bechdel Test. Although there are two named women in the movie, they never talk to one another because one dies in the first half hour of the film. and the other doesn’t appear until the last half hour of the film.

And so we have a gory, bloody, xenophobic, American-Exceptionalism-fueled, testosterone-laden, misogynistic, bomb-toting, unrepentantly civilian-slaughtering showdown of a film that was awful from beginning to end. Thumbs down.

The post London Has Fallen: An abhorrent movie, fueled by American exceptionalism, testosterone, and xenophobia appeared first on Occasional Planet.