By AriDy Nox

We are socialized to consistently think of oppression in the most simplistic forms possible: Racist/not racist, sexist/not sexist, bigoted/not-bigoted. But white supremacy is not simple. This is an enduring truth that has been deliberately denied by our larger culture. Indeed, such persistent simplification is a vital mechanism of white supremacy and all its interconnecting oppressive systems. Society presents oppression as lacking complexity in order to convince us to believe the ways to combat oppression can also be simple.  

Even as freedom fighters directly confront this oversimplification and work to build silos within this system, often we only achieve varying degrees of “good” (anti-oppression) within these havens. But within the system itself, there is no “good,” there is only varying negations of bad.

Which brings us to Nancy Pelosi. 

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind for the Speaker of the House, and it all has to do with first-term House Representatives Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a conglomerate of progressives who have been affectionately nicknamed “The Squad” by their supporters. The most recent development in this political cyclone has been Pelosi’s vocal support of The Squad in the wake of tweeted bigotry from the president. In fact, Pelosi has pushed a vote on the House floor repudiating Commander Cheeto for his virulent harassment of these women of color. 

But Pelosi’s support comes on the heels of her own dismissive critique of The Squad not a week prior. “All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world” she said “but [at the time of the vote] they didn’t have any following.”

In fact, the aforementioned tweets by Benedict Donald could easily be read as a defense of Pelosi herself from the attacks she faced at the hands of Squad supporters. Attacks that were incurred from House leadership pushing through the Senate version of a $4.6 billion emergency funding bill for the crisis at the border in spite of the bill giving over $1.3 billion without clear restrictions on its allocation. This includes $145 million to the Department of Defense to fund military expenses along the border, $200 million in funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and $110 million in overtime funding for Customs and Border Protection employees. 

Initially, Pelosi and House leadership opposed the bill, presenting their own version with much stricter guidelines. The Squad voted against this version as well on the grounds that any allocation of funds to these organizations would be amoral. But with Fourth of July fast-approaching, Democrat moderates pressured Pelosi to forfeit the House bill in favor of the original Senate’s bill on the grounds of the Senate bill being “the most realistic option,” and she capitulated. 

The necessity, morality, and strategics of Pelosi’s decision to allow the Senate bill on the House floor and vote it through can/has been debated by political experts much more skilled than me. But it is crucial that we note that the crisis happening at our “borders” is one that overwhelmingly targets people of color and is deeply steeped in xenophobia and the deliberate profiting off of the bodies of POCs in distress.

I.e. the crisis at our “borders” is racist as fuck. And in response to this crisis, our Democratic controlled Congress decided to allocate billions of dollars to the organizations that created it. 

This, in itself, is not abnormal for American legislation. When people argue that legislating is not advocacy and that representatives are not activists, the truth implicit in their argument is that U.S. legislation is usually just varying degrees of oppressive. “Progressive” legislators are not there to stop this, but to ensure that the degree of oppressive is as diminished as possible.

Legislation, as it currently operates in our country and in most colonized/colonizing governments, does not (and arguably cannot) work to eradicate racism. In order for legislation to do such a thing, it would have to upend whole apparatuses of our governmental structure. And wide-sweeping change, as Pelosi herself is quick to remind us, is not what our representatives do. 

“Some of you are here to make a beautiful pâté,” Pelosi admonished her members in a closed-door meeting, “but we’re making sausage most of the time.” I understand this quote to mean that our government officials within this current configuration of lawmaking are not in office to win us freedom or truly liberate us from oppression because there are too many restrictions on their power to do so. Instead they set out to negate as much of the bad in our systems as possible and in many cases, that means simply minimizing the amount of new bad currently being implemented. 

But the passing of this border bill hardly meets even those bare minimum requirements. And so, progressives, including The Squad, were, to quote Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “pissed.” And they were vocal about their disgust, in articles, in interviews, and on Twitter. 

Pelosi’s response was to specifically dismiss the power of The Squad, minimizing the social capita these women have built through voicing the desires and needs of newer and more progressive voters.

This dismissal seemed to be a breaking point for AOC, who for the most part has been largely deferential to The Speaker. She commented in an interview with the Washington Post that the Speaker’s persistent singling out of the newly elected women of color was outright disrespectful. This, of course, was immediately interpreted as AOC calling The Speaker racist/sexist. 

Even if AOC had been making such an assertion, which she claims she was not, it would beg for nuanced discussions of the interplay between racism, sexism, ageism, and classicism and how these structures of oppression affect power dynamics in DC and the ability of members to negotiate/demand respect from senior members.

Instead, countless people (including many women, and a few prominent Black liberal women) decided to dismiss the new members altogether, arguing it is their lack of experience that prompted Pelosi’s dismissal, not their race or gender. Kamala Harris even felt compelled to come out and say that in her experience Nancy Pelosi has always uplifted women of color, as if that negates the implications of her current actions. 

Even if we accepted the reasoning that Pelosi’s targeted disrespect is a result of The Squad’s lack of experience rather than their marginalized identities, that still begs discussion about why it is acceptable to dismiss highly prominent, clearly learned, and greatly supported members of one’s own party off the basis of those members not participating in Congress’s broken system long enough, especially since their lack of participation in said broken system is why they were elected. It also demands arguments about the inherent racism of deliberately attempting to silence women of color you disagree with in a system that is predicated on the silencing of POCs, femmes and especially POCS who are femmes, regardless of your personal reasoning for attempting said silencing. 

For a while, it looked like some people were prepared to grapple with different variations of all of these difficult questions. But in the midst of all that potential fruitful conversations, of course, comes the Trumpinator. 

His response, now deleted, was so wildly bigoted that it provided what many Democrats, including the Squad, seemed to long for: an opportunity to be unified. Immediately, Pelosi came out in support of the four women and the entire news cycle reconfigured itself.

And thus what the average lay-person now takes away from this situation is that Hurricane Donald is xenophobic. Which, if the concentration camps didn’t clue you in, I don’t know why a tweet sealed the deal.

And this is the insidiousness of simplified bigotry. In a story where Adolf Twitter attacks The Squad with outright hate speech, racism is easy. Racism is unironically telling American citizens of color to go back to the broken countries they came from if they hate America, because you assume they can’t be American. It is doubling down on that sentiment after being called out for the blatant xenophobia.

It is obvious to see and effortless to stand against.

And it stops us from recognizing everything else that led up to such blatant and outright bigotry. It stops us from thinking about the ways that our Congress recently failed us, not only because of the efforts of Republicans like Mitch McConnell pushing through racist and genocidal legislation, but also moderate Democrats assisting in ensuring such legislation gets passed. It stops us from interrogating the fact that, when this failure occurred, the people who were repudiated by the leaders of the so-called liberal party were progressives who were vocal about their disgust, not moderates who deliberately engineered the failing of the more progressive bill. 

It stops us from delving into the nuances of what the silencing of radical women of color implicates, regardless of the intention of the silencers.  It stops us from interrogating the implications of conceding to so-called moderates on the basis of maintaining a majority when said majority apparently cannot ensure harmful legislation does not get passed in Congress. It stops us from analyzing the elitism inherent in undermining the tactics and views of progressive members of Congress on the basis of their lack of seniority in a corrupt system. It denies us all of this complexity and thus denies us the complexity of true solutions to our true problems. 

When we deny oppression’s complexity, we likewise deny the complexity needed in order to obtain our freedom from that oppression. When we limit the ways we acknowledge we are being attacked, we limit the ways in which we can even begin to imagine how to fight back. Such limitation ensures that the system can carry on without the threat of true resistance. And that is unacceptable.

We must be able to carry multiple truths at all times. Our president is a racist. He is all the phobics and he is a living representation of outright bigotry. But he and his ilk are not even the tipping point of our problems. Behind them lies entire systems meant to rob us of our lives and dignity. It is these systems we must attack. And these systems require a variety of nuanced and complex peoples with nuanced and complex strategies in order to combat them. 

In response to Trump’s bigotry, Nancy Pelosi tweeted “Our diversity is our strength and our unity is our power.”

When @realDonaldTrump tells four American Congresswomen to go back to their countries, he reaffirms his plan to “Make America Great Again” has always been about making America white again.

Our diversity is our strength and our unity is our power. https://t.co/ODqqHneyES

— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) July 14, 2019

But diversity cannot consist of only the bodies of various marginalized peoples whilst their ideas, expertise, and change-making is dismissed and undermined. Unity cannot be obtained by silencing those who wish to push us to true liberation. To be strong we must truly work together across difference, which means disagreement, which means holding people accountable, which means being uncomfortable and, sometimes, being opposed. To be powerful we have to allow our differences to embolden our overarching goals: liberation.

As Audre Lorde says, “we have, built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression, and these must be altered at the same time as we alter the living conditions which are a result of those structures… Change means growth, and growth can be painful. But we sharpen self-definition by exposing the self in work and struggle together those whom we define as different from ourselves, although sharing the same goals.” 

If we truly want this society to be more than continuous negation of vast evil, we have to be willing to be bold. We have to actually work through difference. And we have to occasionally hold out for the pâté.

And when we must make sausage, we need to at least ensure it is edible. 

Special thanks to Winne Ye, Audre Lorde and the cited journalist pieces.

Suggested Readings:

Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, lass and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”, Sister outsider: Essays and speeches, 1984

Bell hooks and Jill Soloway, “Ending Domination: The Personal is Political“, YouTube, 2016

Angel Kyoto Williams, “”, AngelKyotoWilliams.com, 2010

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AriDy Nox is an afrofuturist, black feminist/womanist, femme storyteller and social activist. They create out of the vehement belief that creating a future in which marginalized people are free requires a radical imagination.  Twitter and Instagram handle: @aridynox. 

 

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