Black Pen: White Paper — Sophie Rose Schor

I've been trying to figure out what to write. This black pen on white paper.

I wake up and the first thing I read is about fear and revolution, existence and resistance. The US is shaking. Helmets and boots and riot gear and tear gas. Militarized weapons. Tanks rolling down the streets of a Minneapolis neighborhood. The KKK is back in full regalia. A curfew in Denver. A monopoly on violence. A superiority bred into bloodlines and laws and communities.

I am stuck with the image of the tanks and realize that it looks the exact same as that time I saw tanks rolling into Atwaneh at night en route to dismantle Sumud Freedom Camp. Or the video of George Floyd reminds me of videos of the Tamimi child being strangled by a solider with a face-mask on. I’ve seen the tear gas canisters in Palestine that say “Made in Philadelphia” down the sides in a stark reminder that we are connected. Militarized police training in the US is taught by Israeli soldiers. These worlds and realities are intertwined, globalized, saturated, united. I think of our world that we are trying to live in breathe in grow in learn in thrive in.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere—that rings in my ears.

I think of the many ways in which I have been "lucky"—born in the “right” neighborhood, born in the "right" skin tone. I think how I was blessed to go to a school that was mixed, that was colorful, that was spirited; a place that taught me more about the real world than algebra. About these privileges and differences. I think of the ways in which my friends of color navigate their worlds. The way in which walking into a Safeway at 1am, my tall, lanky, goofy, accomplished best friend raised his hands in the air and said to the security guard, "I walked in with this plastic bag. I already bought this." How that disclaimer never would have crossed my mind.

I try to imagine the fear. What does it mean to walk down the street in a black body and not know if the world around you will leave you unscathed, let you walk through unhurt, let you live your life with breath in your lungs and fire in your belly?

I try to swallow my tears, understanding the historic power of erasure that is a white woman crying. And at the same time, my heart struggles to hold all the pain of the world in this moment. I struggle to find my place in this moment. I struggle to feel connected in this moment. This “unprecedented” moment, the year of COVID-19.

Right now, I literally cannot stand with my friends in the streets. These protests, this cycle (haven’t we been here before?), is tinged with a whole new set of fears and anxieties. As a daughter with immune-compromised older folks in my immediate circle, I cannot justify the risk of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a mask in a crowd of strangers demanding justice. Is my absence in public silence? Is it violence? Does it contribute to the continued perpetuation of white supremacy and neo-liberal capitalism in a settler-colonial state? Where does this leave us when we can no longer count every (able) body? A movement crippled by a virus? But have we actually ever been able to count every body?

I’ve been thinking about the Sick Woman Theory by Johanna Hedva almost every day since March (appropriately published by Mask Magazine). She writes of her experiences as a woman living with a chronic-illness and concludes that:

“Sick Woman Theory is for those who are faced with their vulnerability and unbearable fragility, every day, and so have to fight for their experience to be not only honored, but first made visible. For those who, in Audre Lorde’s words, were never meant to survive: because this world was built against their survival….
Sick Woman Theory is an insistence that most modes of political protest are internalized, lived, embodied, suffering, and no doubt invisible. Sick Woman Theory redefines existence in a body as something that is primarily and always vulnerable…
Sick Woman Theory maintains that the body and mind are sensitive and reactive to regimes of oppression – particularly our current regime of neoliberal, white-supremacist, imperial-capitalist, cis-hetero-patriarchy. It is that all of our bodies and minds carry the historical trauma of this, that it is the world itself that is making and keeping us sick…
The Sick Woman is an identity and body that can belong to anyone denied the privileged existence – or the cruelly optimistic promise of such an existence – of the white, straight, healthy, neurotypical, upper and middle-class, cis- and able-bodied man who makes his home in a wealthy country, has never not had health insurance, and whose importance to society is everywhere recognized and made explicit by that society; whose importance and care dominates that society, at the expense of everyone else.
The Sick Woman is anyone who does not have this guarantee of care.”

Hedva finds fault with the claims that political actions can only be read as legitimate in public (à la Arendt) and instead proposes a politics of vulnerability (following Butler’s “Vulnerability and Resistance” lecture). She writes that this kind of resistance is necessary in the face of capitalism, which is built on the backs of “Sick Women” who she reads as anyone who the logic of capitalism exploitation “requires …to die.” So where does this leave us in 2020 as the whole world becomes sick? What can one do from inside a house built by the master’s tools when the streets outside are literally burning?

I got into a fight with my lovely liberal Baby-Boomer parents and told them that whatever it is we’re doing is not enough. In the past, I felt that it was enough to self-educate. To listen. To find ways to quietly lend strength to those whose time it is to be vocal. To watch. To donate. To read black and brown writers, thinkers, lovers, fighters—it is a beginning but it is not enough.

How do we use our privileges, our strengths, and our vulnerabilities in this moment to defend, demand, and determine the future of our world? Once again, I turn to Hedva:

“The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care.
Because, once we are all ill and confined to the bed, sharing our stories of therapies and comforts, forming support groups, bearing witness to each other’s tales of trauma, prioritizing the care and love of our sick, pained, expensive, sensitive, fantastic bodies, and there is no one left to go to work, perhaps then, finally, capitalism will screech to its much-needed, long-overdue, and motherfucking glorious halt.”

I don’t interpret this as a call for self-care and taking bubble baths. I find that this calls on each and every one of us to care for each other. To find the web of the movement and see what important contributions we each have to make that will care for the whole. To find kindness and patience and love to work through these issues with the previous generations in order to build something new together. And that, today, is radical.

Black lives matter. Brown lives matter. Palestinian lives matter (just last week a Palestinian man was shot unarmed by police in East Jerusalem). It's when the world we live in seems to not hear that or see that, then we need to scream it. Scream it from the streets. Scream it from our bedrooms, and kitchens, and living rooms. Chant it online. Beat drums to it, honk our horns to this beat for justice. Beat our heartbeats to it; beat the rhythm of humanity and value and dignity. We must nurture this flame and care for it until it grows into the blaze that will set our world alight.

Resources I’ve found helpful on ways to be involved:

~~this list can be endless—comment and I'll add it~~

Sick Woman Theory by Johanna Hedva

Showing Up for Racial Justice: Solidarity with People of Color

Campaign Zero: The Solutions- Demands of Black Lives Matter

What You Can Do About Police Brutality

26 Ways to Be In The Struggle Beyond the Streets (from 2016 and Ferguson, but still relevant)

Warm Cookies of the Revolution (Denver based)

Center For Social Inclusion’s Talking About Race Toolkit

“White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” by Peggy McIntosh

Resources for protesting:

198 Methods of Nonviolent Action by Gene Sharpe (an non exhaustive list)