Rachel Sanders — Decoded: What My Seattle Womxn’s March Sign Means

Rachel Sanders

Rachel Sanders is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Portland State University. Her research and teaching center on critical race and feminist studies, biopower, health and body politics, and popular culture.

From what I saw live and via social media, the tone of the January 21st worldwide women’s marches presented a striking counterpoint to the previous day’s inaugural proceedings. The signs bearing slogans of defiant protest, searing wit, and intersectional solidarity punctured the dark mood Donald Trump’s first presidential speech, like his campaign, has engendered. Trump’s tone was vividly morbid, eliciting optimism only after prolonged decline and promising safety only in the midst of great danger. 

I took part in the Seattle march. I meant for my sign to denounce and resist the uses of state power Trump has championed, and the terms on which he has rationalized it. The text of my two-sided sign read: Border walls / immigration bans / racist policing / criminalizing people of color / bathroom bills / racial and gendered narratives of protecting cis white women: Not in my name.

I view Trump as articulating what Iris Marion Young and Anna Sampaio have called a racial and gendered logic of protection. In this logic, the state positions itself in the masculine role of protector of a citizenry it positions as subordinate, dependent, obedient, and grateful, in order to legitimate a range of executive and legislative actions that it frames as vital to “homeland security.” The head of state that invokes this logic implicitly identifies with a particular brand of strong-but-chivalrous white masculinity poised to defend a vulnerable populace against dark forces threatening its safety or honor. (To be sure, Trump’s history of bullying women like Megyn Kelly and Heidi Cruz and bragging about committing sexual assault betrays qualities of predatory rather than protective masculinity. His victory, however, suggests that his self-portrait as an executive who will “take care of women” overshadows his record of aggression against them.)

This logic is historically specific to a post-9/11 America defined by a growing Latinx population, systematic police brutality against black and brown Americans, and pervasive unease about foreign and domestic terrorist threats. Yet the notions of race and gender it relies on date back at least to the late nineteenth century, when white lynch mobs’ regular practice of brutalizing black men (and women and children) found convincing justification in what Angela Davis calls ‘the myth of the black male rapist.’ Though there are marked differences, the core racial and gender subject positions of lynching rationales pervade the contemporary racial and gendered logic of protection. Both narratives figure white men as chivalrous protectors of white women’s physical safety. Both demonize men of color as sexual predators, criminals and terrorists. Both valorize white women as worthy of protection while implying their subordinate status as sexual prey in need of male protection. And both devalue women of color by discounting their endurance of systematic sexual assault at the hands of white men since slavery, and by implying that they are unworthy or less worthy of protection.

This logic was the cornerstone of Trump’s candidacy. His campaign kickoff speech portrayed Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and “bad people” who are “bringing drugs” and “bringing crime” across the U.S. border and vowed to build a two-thousand-mile-long wall barring their entry into the country. Among many instances of exploiting tragedies for political profit, Trump seized on the fatal shooting of San Francisco visitor Kathryn Steinle by Juan Francisco Sanchez, an undocumented immigrant who had been deported from the U.S. five times and who had aimlessly fired a stolen gun on Pier 14, as a case of a “beautiful woman” being “viciously killed” and as “another example of why we must secure our border.” Likewise, Trump referred to the gunman behind last June’s Orlando nightclub shooting, who was born in the U.S. to parents who had emigrated from Afghanistan over thirty years ago, as “an Afghan” and cited the tragedy to justify his calls for sweeping immigration bans against all Muslim immigrants. Trump’s geared-to-white-ears stump speech portrayals of “inner cities” as fearsome zones of crime and violence, his proclamations that he is “the law and order candidate” who will make police forces and civilians safe again, and his praise of stop-and-frisk practices (which disproportionately single out black Americans) as a “proactive” and effective policing tactic all contribute to the demonization of black men and women. (As dual threads of racial and gendered narratives of protection, the Charleston church slaughterer Dylann Roof’s assertion that “blacks are killing white people on the streets… and raping white women every day” and Trump’s campaign trail lamentations of endangered police officers and of “Kate, beautiful Kate” share similar premises and invigorate similar stereotypes.

"'Cuckservative' is a neologistic term of abuse formed as a portmanteau of the word cuckold and the political designation conservative. It has become an increasingly popular pejorative label used among alt-right supporters in the United States." (source)

By continuously conflating mainstream Muslim Americans and Latinx citizens with Islamic terrorists and Mexican migrants (he has accused American Muslims of failing to report “people who they know are bad” to security authorities); by peddling a campaign slogan evoking nostalgia for an earlier era of unchallenged white and male economic, social and political supremacy; and by framing America’s greatest threats as Arab terrorists, violent black urbanites, central and south American immigrants competing unfairly for scarce jobs, and Asian nations who have roped the U.S. into “losing” trade deals, Trump’s protectionist narratives racialize not only their villains – people of color, citizens and foreigners alike – but also their victims. They implicitly construct as white, that is, the portion of the American citizenry deemed legitimate and deserving of protection. At the same time, these narratives feminize all members of that worthy citizenry as docile, physically and economically vulnerable, and thus subordinate.

Trump has not been an outspoken proponent of municipal and state policies limiting transgender bathroom access, but he has signaled he will let such laws stand as matters of local sovereignty. In so doing, Trump sustains the logic of masculine protection underpinning recent bathroom bills, which claim to protect cisgender women vulnerable to spying and sexual assault by male and transgender restroom-goers. The conservative lawmakers promoting these bills not only depict trans and gender-nonconforming people as sexually deviant and dangerous and reinforce notions that cisgender women need men’s physical and legislative protection. They also conceal cisgender men’s and women’s practices of harassing, intimidating, and assaulting trans and gender-nonconforming people in bathroom settings. Trump’s inaction on this issue sustains these dominant safety narratives. And his incendiary rhetoric and campaign rally antics have invited ordinary citizens to act as vigilante bullies and law and norm enforcers.

In his first days in office, President Trump continues to demonize black, brown and Muslim Americans and to exalt a select, authentically American constituency in need of protection. By portraying this constituency as the weak and grateful beneficiary of gallant masculine guardianship and vilifying virtually all people of color in the process, Trump plays a powerful role in reproducing the racial and gender stereotypes that perpetuate the inequalities a truly “great” America must shatter. His rhetoric is more threatening to social justice than the forces he so starkly depicts.

As a white woman, I am unwillingly but inescapably part of the constituency President Trump claims to protect. My sign was one way of saying: not in my name. Blanket immigration bans and border walls that unduly criminalize Muslims and Mexicans in order to protect “native” Americans (oh, Mr. President, tragic irony eludes you): not in my name. A “law and order administration” that disproportionately targets and brutalizes black people in order to safeguard “good” communities: not in my name. Upholding “states’ rights” to enact bathroom bills in order to shield girls and women from hypothetical violation by predatory restroom users (while open-carry gun laws remain on the books): not in my name. I stand against, and I must find new ways to resist, the policies and executive actions being staged, or at least legitimated, on my behalf, and I urge other white Americans to do the same.

Bonnie Honig — Trump's Upside Down

Bonnie Honig

Brown University, Antigone Interrupted

We have not lately – not until this election season -- seen or heard the dog whistle politics of racism, sexism, Nativism, and homophobia so eagerly thrust aside by a Presidential candidate and, with such glee: traded for openly racist invective, division, misogyny, nativism, and more…
  It is no accident, as the historians love to say, that this past television season, the breakout show was Stranger Things, which I watched and loved, along with many of you, I am sure. Stranger Things is a romp through 80’s nostalgia, from Steven Spielberg’s E.T. to Alien and more.

  Aspects of the 80’s for which I myself am less nostalgic were also peddled by the show – in particular the Reaganist antipathy to government, as such. Reagan was famous for his witticisms, which he kept on index cards in his desk, piles of them. One of his most famous lines was this:
"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I'm from the government and I'm here to help.’" This sentiment, also a piece of 80’s nostalgia, is central to the show, Stranger Things.

   In the show, the bad guys are from the government and their “help” is a nightmare. The local sheriff, by contrast, is a flawed hero whose intelligence and courage will save the day, more or less. Himself presumably on the public payroll, he does not code “government” because he is local. Government means Washington in 1980’s Reaganism. It is notably only for white communities that the local sheriff is the better representative of justice by contrast with the federal government. Noticeably there are very few minorities in Stranger Things.
  Stranger Things is importantly prescient in this moment, our moment, because it explores the distinction, newly permeable, between what is out in the open, and the secretly subterranean crap that underwrites it and lies beneath it.
In Stranger Things, the world we know and love is underwritten by a place called “the upside down” – in which what is normally unseen – the repugnant --is regnant.
In the Upside Down, a yucky carnivorous gelatinous monster feasts on people and impregnates them with its own progeny. What is that yucky gelatinous stuff? It could be anything; or many things …

Racism? Sexism? Homophobia?
What opens the door to it? What lets it in?
In the show, the monster gains access to the normal world by dint of the rogue and irresponsible science of government technocrats whose ambition knows no bounds and who do not hesitate to engage in torture to get what they want. And then of course they get more than what they want. Things go awry, as Mary Shelley could have told them they would.
   The gelatinous monster lives down below the earth on which we walk, lurking there, normally unseen and unsuspected. But the divide between our world and the monster’s is breached, and the gelatinous monster breaks in, grabbing people, eating and impregnating them. This keeps happening because of technocrats who think they know what they are doing and, confident they are right, are arrogant in their use of power and surveillance, willing even to torture to achieve their aims. They use a water tank that references water boarding. The screams of the child whose telekinetic powers they want to harness will not be easily forgotten by those who watch the show. 

   These people – scientists, technocrats, lawless, self-proclaimed knowing representatives of the public’s good – let’s call them for a moment the Democratic Party – open the door to forces that are unspeakable and are normally more contained. Because of their actions, the gross evils of the world can now get in. As the Observer reported on Nov 10, 2016: the Clinton campaign decided early on that “it was in the best interest of Clinton, and therefore the Democratic Party, that Trump was the Republican presidential nominee. Polls indicated Sen. Rubio, Gov. Kasich, or almost any other establishment Republican would likely beat Clinton in a general election. Even Cruz, who is reviled by most Republicans, would still maintain the ability to rally the Republican Party—especially its wealthy donors—around his candidacy. Clinton and Democrats expected the FBI investigation into her private email server would serve as a major obstacle to Clinton’s candidacy, and the public’s familiarity with her scandals and flip-flopping political record put her at a disadvantage against a newcomer. Donald Trump solved these problems.”[1]

 But, in fairness, the villains of Stranger Things, the people – scientists, technocrats, lawless, and self-proclaimed knowing representatives of the public’s good who open the door to forces that are unspeakable and are normally more contained -- could also be called the Republican Party: the government scientists are clearly interested in awakening, fostering and then nurturing and maintaining the terrible forces of the Upside Down. (think: Tea Party). The government agents clearly think there is here a powerful weapon they can leash to their politics. They clearly hope to control and instrumentalize it, just as they believe they can control and instrumentalize a girl, named 11, whose telekinetic powers prove forceful enough finally to break through.

  In other words, the Upside Down and our regular world are finally connected through the unwitting agency of an innocent child whose body is taken by others as a vehicle for their own projects; what the government agents do, then, is not that different from how the monster makes some people’s bodies into the vehicles of its own wants and desires. Forced impregnation codes Republican (pro-life). The liberty-abrogating enlistment of some for the purposes of others? That codes Democratic, from a Republican perspective. Call it taxation. 

  How then do we code the young girl’s rage at the takeover of her body and her life by others for purposes that are not her own? It is her explosive rage (think Carrie), that punctures the firewall between our world and the Upside Down. Perhaps this is anarchy or populism, raw, emotional REFUSAL.

  Thus the argument for federal oversight on human rights, voting rights, redistribution, social welfare, environmental protection, has no language, no traction, no reality in the world of Stranger Things – which I now recognize as an even guiltier pleasure than I thought it was while I was watching it.
Others will tell the story of how the US media – which made MILLIONS of dollars on this election, what a windfall -- made Trump possible: the free airtime, the legitimating coverage (“they are both flawed”…), and so on.
But, it is notable that print media was better, sometimes MASSIVELY better. The Washington Post in particular wrote expose after expose. But in the world of the Upside Down all that matters are the appetites, not facts. There is no traction for truth in that gelatinous world.

  Which brings me to what happens after the breach, in our world, what we are seeing now: The media cannot legitimate this Presidency quickly enough. It is as if, if we were living in the world of Stranger Things, the media have decided the monster is not THAT gelatinous, and people are having its babies, so we may not like it, but he is the President-elect, after all, and he deserves a certain deference.

 The material result of that deference could be seen in People Magazine, whose own reporter was groped by the man they quickly moved to coronate: “starting the morning of November 9, the first morning Trump became the President-elect, [there was] a definitive shift: People began to cover Trump and his family in a noticeably more positive light. Their first tweeted-out story cheekily exclaimed “He’s hired!,” a reference to Trump’s “you’re fired” Apprentice catchphrase.
… and then the magazine featured pictures of his family, noted the fashion savvy of his wife, and speculated about whether he would turn the White House to gold with his new decorating plans (watch out subcontractors …. better get big up front deposits for that job). No mention was made of what happened to Midas.
  On the same day, that very evening, thousands, tens of thousands of people, hit the streets in cities across the country, protesting the election of this man and rejecting everything he has stood for, has legitimated, and will now mainstream.
  The front page of the New York Times reported on all this, but – like People magazine – the New York Times made a choice. It covered the protests, but put the protest stories below the fold. Above the fold was their lead story: about Trump and his victory. 

  This division is not what democracy looks like.
But it is what the US looks like, always hasty to sweep things under the proverbial rug and get on with legitimate business, or the business of legitimation.
So, as citizens, we will all have a choice to make going forward:
  Do we allow ourselves to be absorbed in to the gelatinous    
  normalization of a Trump presidency? Or do we hold on to   
  our moral compasses? Notably, in Stranger Things, 
  compasses go haywire near the openings to the Upside 
  Down. Do we find ways to give the truth some traction? 
  How do we hold on to our outrage and give it purpose?

Trump Tower Protest Photo by Jeremy Liebman, Vice Magazine

 For starters, we have to turn the NYTIMES Upside Down. Read below the fold, not above. Reverse their priorities.
To do this, you need to nurture your moral compass. Hold on to what you KNOW. Don’t be talked out of what you heard in the Access Hollywood tape and do not forget what you saw at the rallies. You know what you know. 

 We also have to volunteer to work for organizations that will be under pressure, not only for the do-gooding (though, why not?) but also and even more importantly for the membership. Victims taken to the Upside Down by the ravenous gelatinous monster are – so far in the show – always alone, caught in solitude. Action in concert is the only protection against the gelatinous monster.

Trump Tower Jeremy Liebman, Vice Magazine

“The world turned upside down” is the refrain of a song from Hamilton, the words are said to come from a British drinking song of the time. English soldiers, processing the end of Empire, use the phrase that connotes revolution and, for them, loss. The phrase is sung mournfully by the English in the show, while those – like Hamilton -- who are working for the American Revolution rap it out by it’s name.
   We are now in the Upside Down. And it is up to us what to make of it. 
  I note that the kidnapped boy in Stranger Things, is a little bit gay, cast as a Mama’s boy, a darling child, who is – of course -- bullied at school. He is finally (SPOILER ALERT) rescued by his mother and the sheriff. They risk everything to go to the Upside Down and kidnap him back. He is almost dead when they get to him. He has managed to survive, barely to survive, alone with all his fears, by doing what needed doing. He found his way to a little clubhouse, a kind of holding environment, and he hung on. His mother and the sheriff get to him in time. Barely. And then they go home. They repair the breach that allowed the monster to get in. Will we have a happy ending? 

It won’t surprise many of us that, as he returns to health, the boy coughs up what seems to be a residue of the Upside Down, some sort of gelatinous thing, that washes down the drain. Within him, it seems, occupying his body, is the stuff against which he was trying to defend himself, and to which we are all vulnerable. The young boy – innocent and fey – is a Trojan Horse. What are we?

Bonnie Honig — Despondent? Or Respondent? (de-)Medicalizing Resistance

Bonnie Honig 

Brown University, author, Antigone, Interrupted.  

I have taught Sophocles’ 2500 year-old play Antigone for many years now and it changes every time I teach it because it is changed by the times. Two years ago, right after the killing of Michael Brown, whose dead body was left lying in a Ferguson road for 4 long hot hours, my students were haunted by Polynices, Antigone’s brother, left out as carrion for birds and dogs: “unwept, unburied,” Antigone says, outraged that the sovereign, Creon, has commanded such sacrilege. In the two years since, we have seen tens more such images, the bodies of murdered African Americans lying in a road, in a park, in a playground, silent testimony to a sovereign police power unashamed by its violence or unused to accountability. Terence Crutcher and Keith Scottt are the most recent to die at the hands of police. We know the rhythm of the aftermath: the voices of the Antigones and the Creons call for justice, plead for calm, convene grand juries, file no charges, maybe someone is fired, maybe not.
I taught the play last week, before this latest wave of violence. It was the day after it was announced that the family of Sandra Bland had settled their suit against Waller County, Texas. Hearing that news while reading the play, I suddenly realized that Sandra Bland, just like Antigone, killed herself while walled off away from others in a rocky cell. Both women were found dead, hanging by a noose of their own fashioning. Both might have lived had they waited a bit longer. Both chose not to wait out their time.

Antigone does not wait because she fears that a long slow death is all that awaits her. For violating Creon’s decree and burying her bother, she has been immured in a cave with some rations to last a few days so that Creon and the city are distanced from her punishment. The rations mean, in a way, that the gods have more time to decide her fate. They can take their time. But this is not a mercy; it is a torture. As she is led to the cave, Antigone airs her fears, recalling the terrible slow death of the goddess, Niobe. The chorus criticizes her for comparing herself to a goddess. But Antigone is not self-aggrandizing here. She sees in Niobe’s example her own future and it terrifies her: “think what a living death she died,” Antigone says. Niobe was “there on the mountain heights,” the stone grew around her and was “binding as ivy” and it “slowly walled her round.” Antigone describes Niobe’s long slow death – “wasting away” -- accompanied by unceasing tears, to this day: “and the rains will never cease, the legends say.” It is horrific: a death that never ends. Who would want that?

James Ridgeway's Solitary Watch

 This is why Antigone hangs herself in her cave right away -- to save herself from the long slow death decreed by Creon. She takes matters into her own hands, chooses a hasty exit from this life and, in so doing, she shows she has agency even when imprisoned, tucked away from contact with the world. With her suicide, she moves from an object of Creon’s wrath to an agent fulfilling a destiny. It is an agency that Creon never suspected she had.

Bland, too, was entombed in a rocky place away from the world, hung herself, and was found, too late, dead. No one suspected she had the agency for such an Antigonean act. And even now, no one does. In its aftermath, her act was medicalized. She had reported feeling depressed and suicidal and was not given the medical attention that was her right. It is part of the settlement – in addition to the money the family will receive – that from now on the jail has to have appropriate medical staff on duty at all times. I assume the legal claims of Bland’s family were strengthened by the compelling evidence that Bland felt depressed and suicidal, reported this to the police, and was not attended to properly. We could medicalize Antigone that way, too. Creon did! He says she is insane, mad. She certainly sounds depressed and suicidal. She says she is fated for death, that she is indeed already dead, and that she longs to be with her dead brother in the afterworld. Creon notes that she seems to “long for death.” But most of Antigone’s readers see her as a political martyr not a depressed suicide. 

   

Could we not also de-medicalize Bland? I read that, in the months leading up to her fateful encounter with Texas police, she had been posting on Facebook about police killings of black people, that she was paying attention to injustice, that she was becoming ever more impatient with racial inequality, that she was saddled by debt. She may have suffered from depression, she may have felt suicidal. These are serious medical conditions, symptoms of mental illness. But they may also be symptoms of rising consciousness, signs of conscientious objection, which may lead to an increased inability to go on living in an unjust world. To be despondent is to be a respondent – to inequality, to racism, to injustice. Perhaps Bland could not resign herself to the stone of racism growing around her, “binding as ivy,” as it “slowly walled her round.” She might well have felt that a slow death like Niobe’s was all that awaited her, too. Who would want that?  

Korryn Gaines Killed for Refusing to Submit to Baltimore Police

“You’re in love with impossibility,” Ismene says to her sister, Antigone, upon hearing her sister’s plan to bury her brother in defiance of Creon’s law against it. “Very well then,” Antigone replies: “Once my strength gives out I will be done at last.” Did Sandra Bland’s strength give out, too? I imagine Antigone hanging in her cell, and Sandra Bland hanging in hers. I cannot shake the image of these two women, impatient for justice, who rejected the long slow deaths to which they were consigned and took matters into their own hands. Antigone worried that by dying in a cave, sequestered from the world, she might never gain the glory she sought. She anticipated the #SayHerName project of the African American Policy Forum. She wanted the world to say her name. “Tell the world,” she says to her sister, Ismene, knowing that she depends on others for her story to be told the way it should be told.   

Sandra Bland depends on others too. Say her name. Tell the world. 

Lida E. Maxwell — Who Gets to Demand Safety?

Lida E. Maxwell is Associate Professor of political science at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and is the author of Public Trials: Burke, Zola, Arendt, and the Politics of Lost Causes.

As protests against racism on campus have rocked the University of Missouri and Yale University—and spread to places like Claremont McKenna and Amherst—student protesters have come under fire for their call for “safe space.” In particular, writers like Connor Friedersdorf have argued that their demand for safe spaces has created a new kind of intolerance, where all dissenting views are excluded and condemned. This critique of the demand for safety finds allies in leftists who see student activists’ demands for safe spaces as an attempt to avoid rather than address the complexities and realities of the world. In contrast, writers like Roxane Gay have drawn attention to the fact that critics of students demanding safe spaces at Yale, Mizzou, and elsewhere tend to be those who have never feared for their safety, who experience safety as an “inalienable” right. For Gay, the call for safety is not a call to be “coddled” or not to hear opposing perspectives, but rather for the freedom for all students to voice experiences and views in a setting where they do not feel in danger of being mocked, derided, or physically threatened. While some (white, male, cisgender) students might take the privilege of safety for granted—and, in turn, their ability to speak their views however and whenever they like—others (notably, black, female, and queer students) may have to demand it.

I agree with Gay that critics of the student protesters fail to acknowledge the privilege of safety that most of them inhabit. However, I think that Gay’s claim that some people “have” safety while others have to ask for it may keep us from seeing a different and perhaps more insidious problem: namely, that some people’s demands for safety are taken more seriously than others. That is, the issue is not that some people simply feel safe while others do not, but rather that some people’s demands for safety are backed up by state violence and law, while others are left at the mercy of that violence. Put differently, the “feeling” of safety that Gay rightly says is a privilege is one that is created through social, political, and legal institutions that frame some people’s demands for safety as legitimate and urgent—and in need of violent enforcement—while framing others’ demands for safety as a desire for “coddling.” 

For example, while black students and their supporters at Mizzou and Yale are often mocked when they ask for a safe space, Donald Trump is taken seriously by Republican voters when he argues that we must erect a United States’ southern border to keep Americans safe from Mexican rapists and criminals. In fact, Trump’s demand that we keep (white) Americans safe from Mexicans has him atop the Republic primary poll in New Hampshire. Similarly, when Darren Wilson says that he felt so threatened by Michael Brown that he had to shoot him, or when George Zimmerman claimed that he felt threatened by Travyon Martin (and thus had to shoot him), or when the Cleveland police officer who killed 12 year old Tamir Rice claimed that he felt so threatened by this little boy that he had to shoot him, these men are taken seriously and their demands for safety are affirmed legally and sometimes politically.

Some people might say that the kind of safety that police officers and Donald Trump and George Zimmerman demand is an entirely different kind of safety than the kind called for by the college students at Yale and Mizzou—that they are talking about physical rather than psychological safety. But can we separate out these two kinds of safety? The safety from racist comments, threats, and (yes) even costumes that these students demand is not just a demand to be kept safe from the violence of speech, but also from the always present risk that hateful speech will turn into hateful violence—a risk that many of us have felt when having homophobic or racist comments shouted at us, or when we have been sexually harassed or intimidated. On the other hand, Trump’s, Wilson’s, and Zimmerman’s claims that they felt or feel physically threatened are not at all self-evident; their demands for safety are demands that we see certain kinds of individuals (Mexicans, African-Americans who possess no weapons but who look, in Wilson’s words, “like a demon”) as greater threats than others (i.e. the armed white men who kill or threaten to kill black and Latino individuals).

Surely what the students at Yale and Mizzou are protesting is not simply racism, but precisely this kind of racist view of safety: that is, a view of safety that allows certain lives to count more than others, and that allows some people’s demands for safety to come at the expense of the lives of others. 

The logic of safety expressed in the violent acts of Wilson and Zimmerman (among others)—that in order for some to be safe, others need to be disciplined, threatened, or killed—is entirely familiar. It is evident not only in the police violence against (and racial profiling of) black men and women, and in violence against queers and trans people. It is also evident in the cycle of violence that we see re-perpetuated in response to the Paris attacks, where some French and American leaders claim that in order to be safe, Syrian refugees must be kept out, and cities in Syria must be bombed.

In the context of these racist and Islamophobic demands for safety—backed up by state violence and law—it seems more important than ever to support and stand in solidarity with college students’ demand for safe spaces. While their demand for safety could certainly re-enact (on a limited scale) the exclusivity of the violent logic of safety I sketched above, their demand for an ideal of safety as a space of inclusion and equality stands as an important counterpoint to the racist idea that safety depends on the violent exclusion of difference. In this ideal, safety is not contingent upon the exclusion and disciplining of (minority) others, but rather upon the shared commitment to affirm, acknowledge, and find space for the diverse experiences of everyone. Here, safety is not a feeling of knowing that threats to you have been killed or quarantined, but rather in a feeling of knowing that the risk of being who you are—expressing your views, presenting yourself freely to others—will be borne not only by you, but also by others, who will create a space of safety around you.  

Student protest at the University of Missouri

One thing—among others—that these student protestors have done is reminded us of an insight of the feminist and gay rights movements: that safety is not a purely physical condition, having to do with whether you are physically threatened, but also a political and social condition. In other words, political and social structures—such as racism, sexism, transphobia, and homophobia—turn certain people (usually marginalized groups) into supposed “threats,” and in turn license violent behavior toward them. The move to create “safe spaces” for women and gays and lesbians was a way to try to create spaces where individuals could feel the freedom and equality that they wanted to create on a broader social scale. In our current political moment—where demands for safety have been used to license increasingly violent acts—standing with students’ demands for an ideal of safety premised on equality, freedom, and shared risk holds out one of the few hopes of challenging this violent logic for safety on behalf of creating (even if only in microcosm, as an ideal) the conditions of a safe world for everyone.

Student protests at the University of Missouri

24 Hours in America’s Gulag

Lori Marso
Union College

I can understand why Toya Graham, Baltimore mom, smacked down her only son to keep him from becoming “the next Freddie Gray,” desperate and violent as it was. After her actions were caught on video and went viral, the nation congratulated her for “keeping order” in her family. She later clarified, however, that her motivation was not to discipline her son, but to keep him out of jail. Her Facebook post said: “Really, do u know what they will do to u?” “They” are the police in America’s gulag. And all parents should be afraid.

I have been thinking about the desperate 24 hours I spent about a year ago in the Schermerhorn Courthouse in Brooklyn where my 22-year-old son was being held and I worried about his safety. Aside from police and court officers, my niece and I were the only white people present. We were the only whites among over one hundred family members of those jailed in the basement below, unseen and unheard, awaiting arraignment. I alternately waited on a bench, or stood in line, clutching my “prisoner’s” assigned number, the line slowly snaking to the small closed window, where there were white people, the bureaucrats assigned to looking up our cases. The man behind the window would inform us that there was no information, and that what we could do was simply wait, and get back in line. 

So I waited, fending off panic attacks by listening to and speaking with the family members around me. I had just taught Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, in my African American Political Thought class, that semester, and so I should not have been surprised by the stories of police harassment, police violence, surveillance, and the day to day experience of it being made known that your life simply does not matter. But the stories took on a new urgency, book learning turning into my own experience, as it was now me who was there, waiting to hear about my own son, and being told by family members, kindly but also in a warning tone, that as long as I did not find his number on the list moving to Rikers Island, that the worst may not happen.

The emotions closest to the surface for me were helplessness and rage. How could my son possibly be sent to Rikers? How could he have disappeared into a bureaucracy, worst yet, a basement, in confinement, and I had absolutely no right to speak to him or have access to a lawyer? I worried about the worst, and the families around me confirmed these nightmares. Yes, the conditions below were horrific—those jailed were in overcrowded and unsanitary quarters with scant food or water, completely beholden to the discretion of the jailers. No, we have no rights until after arraignment which could take up to 72 hours, and even then, our rights are a crapshoot, depending on which courtroom and which judge to whom one’s prisoner was assigned. Listening and sometimes holding hands with other mothers, I was told that the daily lives of the families I spoke with were full of constant abuse, dehumanization, and ever consuming fear for the safety and well being of their children. 

What was most amazing to me was the help I received in navigating the situation and the solidarity extended to me, an outsider to the system. It was obvious that I was out of my element and I turned immediately to others for consolation and commiseration, but also for advice. When I was advised to go out and retrieve bail money in anticipation of arraignment, a woman held my prisoner number and promised to watch the lists for me. She informed me that if there is not a family member present in the courtroom, it is highly unlikely for the prisoner to be brought up for arraignment and that my son should not miss his chance while I was out getting money. I was so discombobulated at the ATM, however, that I locked myself out of my account using all the wrong passwords and returned with nothing. A group of people promised to get bail money together, whatever my son and I needed, so that given the chance we could get out “before night court was over.” The level of organization and solidarity was striking to me, emerging as it did under such tense and difficult conditions. I was deeply grateful and also quite impressed. 

Unlike for so many of the protestors arraigned recently in Baltimore, in my son’s case, bail wasn’t needed. After 24 hours, we left the Courthouse, all charges (riding a bike on a sidewalk, petty drug possession, and violation of park curfew) dismissed for “time served.” We escaped, but families like the ones I met in the Schermerhorn Courthouse are treated every single day as less than citizens, made to realize, in a brutal and direct way, that they have diminished control over their future. Parents know all too well the anxiety of feeling they cannot even keep their children safe, much less hope for a decent education and good jobs. Just for a moment I shared their fate and had to bear the burden of this intense feeling of helplessness, but thankfully, my son and I were able to walk away. 

Most of what white Americans hear, see, and read is framed by the dominant media with its racist and classist assumptions about the sanctity of property and respect for the law, a position that disavows state violence while highlighting the violence of protestors and “rioters.” The media framing of Toya Graham’s actions are a case in point. How can we begin to understand the conditions of life in Black America without hearing from those directly affected and trying to understand their perspectives?

To ignore the daily conditions of life for non-white and poor Americans is a national crime. My experience with the police state in New York City has profoundly affected how I have understood events in Baltimore in response to the murder of Freddie Gray, and the many other black lives lost this year (and every year) to police violence. Because of my experience, the physical violence of incarceration and the emotional violence inflicted on families are now a little closer for me in my imagination. Having experienced police power more directly, even though only for a short moment, the irruption of the anger of those who live within this “other America” seems to me viscerally clear and compelling. These are the responses from the depths of America’s gulag.