What we are not going to do right now is ignore the South
Aren't we tired of this narrative?
Hi Folks,
As we all know by now, last Friday the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe vs. Wade. We shared some resources for what that means, especially for the South, in last week’s Resource Roundup. Reckon in particular has a very helpful guide to abortion in a post-Roe South.
Within five minutes of reading about this decision, I came across what would be the first of many tweets about how grateful one is to live in New York. Or California. Or any other “blue” state. I have seen this post in so many variations the last few days, people talking about how grateful they are to have a local or state government that cares about them, how they can’t imagine any other reality. I’ve seen posts of people leaving states— often Southern, mostly the urban South– they had moved to over the decision. I’ve seen people getting arrested already in the South, clinics getting shut down, appointments cancelled. I’ve seen people from here uniting together on the internet to make plans to move away. I’ve seen mobilization and protest. It’s hard not to think that we have seen it all before; the wave of Black Lives Matter protests was only two years ago. What has changed? Why does it all seem to have gotten worse?
The support I have seen for the South has often come from those of us already here. It feels this way so often lately. We support our own. The rest of the country seems to watch and throw blame. We are told to vote. We are told to donate. We are told to give more money to the people in charge, despite the ways in which they have ignored and forgotten about us when they have been the ones with the power.
I feel like every week I write the same post, asking the rest of the internet to stop blaming the South as a whole for this country’s problems, and instead focus on the handful of people keeping the rest of us in a chokehold. I am so tired of writing this post.
What is wrong with us as a country that right after a monumental decision such as this one, we immediately turn to talking about gratitude only in terms of how it benefits us? As humans, we are self-serving by nature. I know that. It was a lifetime of being selfish that led me to empathy work, which led me back home. Caring for a place that often felt like it hated me required greater empathy than I had ever had to cultivate. It required casting away my own judgements, my own hatred, my own learned associations, and instead trying to look at what lay before me. What I found is a place where people are more open and willing to support each other than anywhere else I have ever been. Down here, we know we can’t rely on external support. We can’t rely on the government or the rest of the country to save us. We also know that it is impossible to do any of this truly alone. Together, we save ourselves. We save each other.
One interesting development I have seen the last few days is the way in which many people— largely cis, straight, middle and upper class white women — are learning something that many folks in this country have long known. The government doesn’t particularly care about you, and it never really has. Many people who have spent years thinking they could trust the people who are meant to care for them are suddenly realizing the opposite to be true.
Anyone of a minority identity in America has known this already. Capitalism establishes systems and then spends lifetimes working to reinforce them; outside of those systems lies free-thinking, creativity, community. It is outside of systems and binaries where we can come together and achieve real, structural change. And moving beyond those binaries requires ridding ourselves of stereotypes and associations and finding a new common ground. It requires detaching from the notion that red is bad and blue is good, that politics are as simple as a two-party system, that the stories we have clung to about this place and who we are within it are often lies, and that our great work is to write new ones together. It is one of the most difficult— and most necessary— tasks we can possibly undertake as a country. And it will not come unless we first stop making blanket judgements about other places and the people within them.
So yes, I am angry. I am angry and I am afraid and I hope you are too. I feel like I am losing rights in the place I call home each day and sometimes, yes, like many other people, all I want to do is leave. But that is not the answer. I stand on the backbone of so many strong Southern folks who have fought— and achieved— change. I cannot, and will not, turn my back on that history.
Now is not the time to look away from the South because it is complicated or difficult or backwards. None of us are free until all of us are free. I know that the easiest path would be to walk away and abandon hope. It is taking almost everything in me not to do that, and to hold on to hope that at the end of this is somewhere better for all of us.
And let’s not forget— hope is work. Hope is hard. It is radical, and it is resistance.
I would like to leave you with these words by Mariame Kaba on hope as a discipline:
“It’s work to be hopeful. It’s not like a fuzzy feeling. Like, you have to actually put in energy, time, and you have to be clear-eyed, and you have to hold fast to having a vision. It’s a hard thing to maintain. But it matters to have it, to believe that it’s possible, to change the world.”