The Crushing Sense of Nobodiness

Acquisition.

How did we get to “here?” It’s safe to say maybe we
never left “here.” They are swarming and they’ve been swarming; we just lied
when we said “never again.”

A couple of years ago I was in Munich, Germany, and
I wrote:

There has been an uprising in the fascist community here and Munich is
somewhat conservative compared to other places in Germany so it’s even worse.
Conservative groups claiming to not be fascists but accepting Nazis to be a
part of their groups have been demonstrating every Monday for a while and
ANTIFA and others come out to counter their demonstrations. Cops come out every
time, so it’s apparently very sketchy.

To read it
now and reflect on our current state is jarring. I wasn’t making the
connection, but why wasn’t I? These problems are a world away, I thought, they
will never reach us. These are things I’m sure passed my window, but the world
has shrunk. The impact of international opinion on the
attitudes of Americans has always affected our political climate more than we
imagine. I feel that the concern should have been placed more so on ones who
think themselves white. Far too often it’s placed on the backs all the
marginalized people of the U.S. That international disdain for our “inaction”
really aided in warping the self-image of Black and Brown Americans. I’m not
saying international opinion is solely to blame, I just see now that Trump is
in office everyone’s attitude has changed to refocus their critiques or maybe
should be refocused on their home. Globalization no longer allows these
uprisings to be considered isolated. We are all complicit.

We all must do our part to upset the beast.

In 1964 Harold Isaacs wrote that “the
end of white supremacy in the United States is being forced by the end of white
supremacy in the rest of the world.” With this in mind, we can see that it’s no
coincidence what was coming: with fascism en vogue worldwide it has empowered
the Nazis (alt-right).

It’s also important to acknowledge that we were
dismantling before and somehow we were subdued. I’d like to think we were
calmed by the illusion of victory, but white supremacy does a great job of
training others to defend it, even when it’s destroying them. The
disease convinces the host to eat itself. We ran them down before and we can do
it again, but now we will need to review the past to see where we zigged when
we should have zagged.

It’s the fear that raises their armour, that fear of
losing white privilege. As Toni Morrison said in a recent essay, “there are ‘people of color’
everywhere, threatening to erase this long-understood definition of America.
And what then? Another black President? A predominantly black Senate? Three
black Supreme Court Justices? The threat is frightening.” she goes on to say
that “white people’s conviction of their natural superiority is being lost.”

Black folks looked internationally for some type of hope
in liberation as the clock was turning to the 1930s. We looked in the direction
of some nonviolent resistances like the ones being used in India, working to
challenge British imperialism. Seeing other tactics in fighting imperialism
worldwide was where we found ways to liberate ourselves, ways to strengthen
ourselves. Using these examples, we thought maybe nonviolent resistances could
be used to oppose U.S. based white supremacy. We fought racism before race,
seeing the similarities in our struggles internationally, because racism is a
mechanism created by imperialism. In the mid-1920s, the Ku Klux Klan had
between two and three million members! Racial violence was overflowing and
omnipresent. Resistance did not seem like an option.

In an interview with Jimmy Carter held in the early 1980s,
he talked about the 1938 fight between heavyweight boxer Joe Louis ‘The Brown
Bomber’ and the German Max Schmeling. It was the rematch where Joe was
attempting to avenge his previous loss to Max, who had been highly celebrated
by the Nazis. He said the night of the fight his family ran the radio in the
fields. Many Black folks flocked to the Carters’ yard to listen to the fight.
As the Brown Bomber pummeled Schmeling, Carter recognized the quiet
satisfaction of the Black crowd. It was a jarring glimpse that he saw behind
that veil of Black humble submission with segregation. Behind it, a racial
pride resided and an intention to in any way possible stop oneself from
acknowledging the legitimacy of white supremacy. I see this now with Colin
Kaepernick and other sports stars more blatantly, but still the same. This
rejection of white supremacy at home and internationally is what empowers us.

The international pressure during the 1960s, which was
turning its focus on racial discrimination in the South, was enough to
encourage change, even if just to save face within our government. This small
change was — let’s be real —mostly a facade.
Our current government, for example, has done a good job of skewering anyone
who disagrees with them, manifesting these dissenters to the population as an
evil enemy who we should silence, instead of listening to their accusations
with concern. Another factor is that pressures internationally about civil
rights have lessened because internationally fascism is rising. Without it
Brexit could not have happened and the ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe could not be
used as an example of what may happen here with fear tactics.

Lynn Burnett wrote this in a piece about the global
context of the civil rights movement: “Although the United States had indeed
made remarkable progress, racial conflict showed no signs of ceasing after the
Civil Rights Act. In fact, the civil rights movement spread dramatically
outside of the South in the second half of the 1960s. As race-based poverty
continued to increase during the civil rights movement, the movement became
more militant. Riots flared across America’s cities, and it became increasingly
clear that white American racism was not just a southern problem. Despite these
facts, the world had become less critical… not of American racism, but of the
American government that they built relations with. Meanwhile,
by the time the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, U.S. officials had begun
to feel that Communism was much less of a threat. The continuing racial
oppression at home no longer seemed to pose much of a national security
concern. And so, just as the civil rights movement was turning its attention
towards the kinds of race-based poverty that plagues America to this day, one
of the major pressures in pushing forward racial justice in the United States — the international
pressures — began to fade.”

The power they/white supremacists/alt-right/fascists
hold comes from this structure of disembodiment; it’s been deployed in
different steps. In order for them (the
minority) to hold power over us (the majority), they have to create an
environment where we feel that we have no effect. It started early and
continued on in various forms.

Take housing projects for example, which enforce rules
that corner majority black and brown people into housing that is built to
purposefully disenfranchise us. Children of the hood or low-income homes are
born beneath a doom cloud, as they say. Raised in poverty, pushed up against
violence and held down by crime, the world brands us with an enduring mark of
inferiority. This type of emotional scarring sometimes never heals.

Low-income housing is always a thinly veiled attempt to
house as many impoverished people as cheaply as possible. White Flight built
new roads that were used as distinguishing lines between these communities. The
ways these roads were constructed was purposeful; their appearance was
intentional to remind these communities’ inhabitants that they were helpless
and second-class or less. Detached from the rest of society in our own cultural
vacuum, our failure is almost unavoidable.
End part I