Hate crime

I Don’t Know How to Talk about the War in Israel

~ Randy Blazak ~ 3 Comments

October 13, 2023

I’m at a complete loss. Tomorrow, it will have been one week since Hamas’ barbaric invasion of Israel that left so many people, especially those beautiful young people at a music festival, dead or kidnapped. Since then, those images and the images of Gaza, the most densely populated place on earth, being bombed into dust have kept me in a constant state of nausea.

I’m at a complete loss on how to talk about Israel and Palestine, in general. I have so many friends on both sides of the issue. Being an undergraduate at Emory (a Methodist university) was a crash course on the Jewish diaspora and how important Israel is to the stability of the Jewish people in the wake of the Holocaust. I read Leon Uris’ 1958 novel, Exodus, like it was first-person history. I’ve also met so many Palestinians, including students of mine, who describe the apartheid they now live in since the state of Israel was created in 1948. They both present the need for their states with such complete legitimacy, it seems insane to even think one side has the most airtight claim on the land.

Since the 1990s, we’ve been able to put our faith in the “two state solution,” that the Gaza Strip in the south and the West Bank in the north will be the nation of Palestine. As a teenager, I watched Jimmy Carter broker a peace deal between Israel and Egypt, so maybe this would work. The deal, which turned the two territories over to the Palestinian National Authority, allowed me to not think as much about Israel and Palestine. The problem was solved, right? But when the terrorist group Hamas, took over Gaza in 2007 and the Gaza Strip became a walled-off prison of 2 million people, I probably should have paid more attention.

I don’t know if this war, which is now almost a week old, ends the idea of a two-state solution. There are already reports of Jewish settlers and Hezbollah militants clashing in the West Bank and media and politicians seem fixated on the war spilling over into a “wider conflict.” Like on 9/11, it does feel like the Earth forever shifted on its axis on 10/7. I saw the image of a child’s bedroom in Ashkelon, Portland’s sister city in Israel. The blood of that child, similar in age to my child, was spattered across the wall by Hamas raiders. I couldn’t hold back the tears. The next image was an apartment block in Gaza City flatted by Israeli rockets, a child, again like my own, covered in dust was searching for her family in the rubble. And again, I cry.

There is a tidal wave of false information already flooding social media about this conflict. Some of it is misinformation that is just wrong on the facts. But much of it is disinformation, purposely shared misinformation to inflame one side or the other, or malinformation, which is true but is shared to cause harm, like the showing of child casualties to enrage viewers to violence. It’s so hard to know what is real. I have to start out with the assumption that most of what I see on social media (and all of what I see on “X/Twitter”) is false. If people are getting their primary information from TikTok, we have a huge problem.

There is also a weird false narrative at work. People (especially non-Jewish Americans) often conflate “Israel” and “Jews,” making anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism fast friends. The opinions among Jews about the policies of Israel are probably as varied as the opinions among non-Jews about the policies of Israel. But there is a parallel line that conflates “Palestinian” with “Hamas.” One could easily argue that the vast amount of suffering in Gaza is because of Hamas. But then this conflation then equates “Hamas” with “Israel,” and that is madness. Israel, like all nations, has all kinds of problems. As in the United States, Israel has human rights issues to answer for. But, unlike Hamas, Israel is a democratic state that submits itself to the scrutiny of its global neighbors. The recent peace talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia are evidence of that. Hamas, harbors genocidal fantasies akin to Hitler’s, and has no desire for “peace.”

So much of my work on violent extremism highlights the role of trauma. And yes, there is a story to be told of generations of Palestinian trauma that would produce the type of mind that could have been capable of slaughtering kids at the “Supernova Sukkot Gathering” music festival last Saturday. But one could argue the history of Jewish trauma is much longer and deeper and doesn’t lead Israelis to rape, murder, and torture anyone in the manner we’ve seen this week. Again, I don’t know how to talk about this because it all defies the limitations of words.  I just want to understand how humans are capable of this.

This conversation could go into all kinds of directions. How Putin, neo-Nazis, Iran, arms dealers, and evangelicals who believe Israel will soon be delivered to Christians are the likely beneficiaries of this mess. About how we have already seen a spike in anti-Semitic and Islamophobic hate crimes in the United States in response to the war. About how dare we enjoy our pumpkin spice latte’s and post-season baseball while hundreds are being held hostage in Gaza. I’m just here to say, as a human being, I don’t know how to talk about this.

As a college professor, I find my young students tend to fall into two categories. The first are emphatic and righteous. They firmly believe that “Israel is a terrorist state” or that “Hamas are subhuman aberrations that must wiped from the face off the earth.” The other, larger group are just completely checked out, endlessly watching reels on their phones. They couldn’t find the “Middle East” on a map, let alone the Gaza Strip. I was trying to engage them in class yesterday and they looked me like, “What does this have to do with me?” I don’t know what’s worse, their indifference or the students who are actively cheering for Hamas.

It’s clear that Hamas wants to escalate the violence and kidnapping Israeli babies is a good way to do it. If rockets and a ground assault from Israel leads to the death of thousands of Palestinians, it furthers their dream of a “holy war” in the region. But I don’t know what the alternative is. A zombie apocalypse (a la World War Z)? An alien invasion? A faster, deadlier version of COVID? I told you I don’t know how to talk about this.

I’m at such a loss for words. The trauma being levied on the children of Israel and the children of Gaza will forever shape their brains. Unlike my emphatic students, I have no idea what the solution is. I can urge for de-escalation, but I also understand the impulse to take up arms and fire rockets. Inaction is off the table but what is the action? We must respond immediately but also wait to better assess the situation.

So I’m here to say I have no answers to this. I’m angry and I’m heartbroken and I know this is so much bigger than me. It seems like the international community, especially Muslim nations in the Middle East, need to defend Israel’s right to exist while fully enfranchising the citizens of Gaza and the West Bank. I don’t know. And I’m going to have to be OK without knowing. As a citizen of nation founded in violence, I can’t tell others not to use violence to form their nations. I can only bear witness to this moment of fire and pain.

Jacksonville is America and America is Sick: Can We Cure White Supremacist Violence?

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

August 29, 2023

You hate to say it’s textbook, but Saturday’s mass shooting in Jacksonville, Florida, that killed three innocent African-American people at a Dollar General store, fits a now familiar pattern. A young white man, living at home, with swastikas drawn on legally purchased guns, travels to an area associated with a minority community with the specific intent to kill non-white people. Terrorism experts, like Tim Clancy, refer to his method as a template.

The shooter, Ryan Palmeter, 21, penned lengthy a racist manifesto, alerting the authorities (and his parents) to his murderous intentions, and scrawled racist messages in white on his weapons. This is now the template, seen in Christchurch, New Zealand (2019, 51 killed), El Paso, Texas (2019, 23 killed), Buffalo, New York (2022, 10 killed), and other racist attacks. Brenton Tarrant, the New Zealand gunman, has become a role model for disaffected white males in America who see “their” country being “stolen” by the “woke mob” and their only recourse is mass violence.

But is it?

Much of will be made that this attack happened in Florida, a state framed by policies hostile to civil rights, critical race theory, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) efforts, black history, and a particular practice of disproportionately incarcerating its black population. African-Americans make up 14 percent of Florida’s population but 48 percent of its prison population. (African-Americans represent 12 percent of the U.S. population and about a third of the prison population.) Black Floridians are five times more likely to be locked up than white Floridians but offending is relatively equal across races. Florida is not a good place to be black.

On May 20, 2023 the NAACP issued a rare “travel advisory” for black people thinking of visiting the Sunshine State: “Florida is openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals. Before traveling to Florida, please understand that the state of Florida devalues and marginalizes the contributions of, and the challenges faced by African Americans and other communities of color.” 

But the assertions made about the imbedded nature of racism in Florida could be made in every state in this country, included here in the “woke” (whatever that means) Pacific Northwest. This happened in Florida but it could just have easily happened here in Oregon. As someone who is wrestling with a family a member with cancer, I recognize that denial is the first obstacle in solving deeply systemic problems. My brother is in denial that his Stage 4 rectal cancer is in multiple parts of his body and will likely be the cause of his death. Similarly, America in denial that white supremacy has metastasized and is present throughout our society.

It’s 2023 and America has a serious white supremacy problem. In 1992, during the Rodney King riots, a white student raised his hand to tell me, “Racism ended in the sixties. Black people are just complaining now.” I responded, “What day? What day racism end? Shouldn’t we mark such an important day with a holiday, or at least a  comparative plate that says, ‘The Day Racism Ended and Black People Just Started Complaining’?” He had no response because racism never ended. It evolved.

Diagnosis 

So dealing with the denial allows us to get to the diagnosis; America has a white supremacy problem in 2023 and it’s not just the criminal justice system. Like a cancer run wild, it is in every aspect of our society. Every system in this county, from schools to health care, is infected with white supremacist norms. There is still a “death gap” between black and white life expectancies in America. The extra 4 years that whites get has nothing to do with gun violence and everything to do with access to health care. But it’s also in all of us. The most progressive liberal Barbie-loving, Bud Light-drinking American, white, black, or otherwise, internalizes white supremacist ideas. I’ve seen it in my young daughter and in myself. Racism is a cancer.

The good news is many of us are treating it. We’re reading, learning, and talking, and acknowledging our mistakes, and building our resistance with healthy doses of antiracist ideologies. We’re exercising our antiracist muscles in hopes of exorcising the racist demons inside us. But a whole bunch of people aren’t. And they are ripe for body crushing tumors.

The treatment

I don’t know if there will ever be a cure for cancer. It’s a slippery thing. There are a bunch of treatments, including surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. My brother is in chemo but he thinks buying pills advertised on InfoWars will save him. Who knows? He might be right. Racism is much the same. We know education and interaction with different populations can serve as a good inoculation, like sticking to a solid Mediterranean diet (olives!), but it’s not perfect. Greeks die of cancer and white people in diverse Florida get infected with Stage 4 racism.

So, like investments, you want to diversify your treatment options (to mix metaphors). My brother can stick with chemo and put his hopes in turmeric. When treating (not curing) racism we need a number of options for different stages of sickness.

So let’s come back to Jacksonville. We should not go any farther in this discussion without acknowledging the incredible trauma that the August 26 attack inflicted on black people across the country. To be black in America is to be constantly reminded that there are people who want to kill you for being black in America. I am writing this in a bar in Northeast Portland and I happened to open my laptop next to a young African-American man who noticed me writing.

Him: What are you working on?

Me: I’m writing a piece about what happened in Jacksonville on Saturday.

Him: They will never stop killing us just for existing.

I didn’t have to tell him what happened in Jacksonville. He’s black. He knew. And he didn’t say “They will never stop trying to kill us,” because we white people are killing them, and not just in discount stores.

So doctors who view black pain differently than white pain (and recent research shows they do), might need a different treatment plan than neo-Nazis who draw swastikas on their AR-15s.

Could Ryan Palmeter have been treated?

Ryan Palmeter, the Jacksonville shooter, is dead. His racism killed him, along with three innocent people who he took out on the way. He initially wanted his killing field to be the halls of Edward Waters University, a historically black college, but he was turned away at the gate. He is not here to answer for his crime. He has ceased to exist. But we are left wondering what could have been done to prevent this wounding of America.

According to the FBI, 80 percent of terrorist plots that are thwarted are stopped because someone close to terrorist came forward. They contacted law enforcement with concerns or talked the potential terrorist into turning themselves in. That’s a lot of carnage that didn’t happen because someone acted. Palmeter lived with his parents and in the days to come we might learn why his parents did not intervene. (Palmeter had come to the attention of authorities in the past.) But what if others had done so?

We will likely get a glimpse of Palmeter’s manifesto, what Jacksonville Sheriff TK Waters called a “diary of a madmen.” And we will learn that Palmeter had been building to this attack over a long period of time. He didn’t suddenly become angry at blacks on Friday and go on a killing spree on Saturday. There will be a long trail of red flags that pointed to his escalation towards terrorism. Obviously, he had been studying previous attacks, including Christchurch, Buffalo, and others. What if someone had seen this young man’s obsession with violent racism and stepped in to divert his path to death?

All of us are credible messengers to someone. There is at least one person on this planet who cares about what we have to say. What if some of those people in Ryan Palmeter’s circle had said, “Dude, what’s going on? I’m worried you’re going down some black hole that you’re not going to come out of.” And if had replied, “Well, black people blah, blah, blah….” And then his credible messengers could have said, “Are you 100% sure that’s true? Where did you learn that? And if it is 100% true, what’s the most effective way to do something about it? It’s probably not violence. Let’s look at other options.”

Violence has become an unacceptable norm in this country. It’s too easy to utilize gun violence as a form of expression. “I’m angry at the world, so I want the world to suffer.” But we’re all angry about something. I’m angry that CenturyLink charged me for three months of wifi after I had their router unplugged. I could go shoot up a CenturyLink kiosk at the mall or I could try to be better about keeping track of my bills. Grievances can be incredibly emotional but we have choices about what to do about them. Sometimes we need a little help figuring that out, especially if we are young men with access to high powered weapons.

Treating Stage 4 racism

In my line of work I encounter a lot of angry white men. They have been told that all of their problems are because of “them.” And the scapegoating comes from the hills to the ivory halls. They haven’t learned that for every problem they’ve got, people of color have 99. They think “their” country is being stolen. But it’s never been their country. It’s only ever been our country. If we can empower the credible messengers among us to have those hard conversations, things may sink in with those angry people. That includes some kid who has been hanging out on fringe websites, like 4chan, and drafting his manifesto. “Yeah, I never thought of it that way. Killing people is probably a stupid idea.”

We’re not going to “cure” every racist mass murderer, like the one who put Jacksonville in the news on Saturday, but there is a chance that this treatment changes the culture, making it more resistant to racism, like getting Americans to eat more Mediterranean food. And that these intervening conversations may help to de-escalate situations that might otherwise add to America’s long national nightmare of hate crime. For those who suffer from the trauma of our past inaction, it’s worth the effort.

The Lynching of Transgender Americans (or What’s Wrong with Kid Rock’s Brain?)

~ Randy Blazak ~ 2 Comments

April 24, 2023

Another day, another story about how much Republicans hate trans people. Opportunistic MAGA bigot Kid Rock aside, how did transgender Americans become the primary target of hate mongers? Did the Ku Klux Klan run out of objects of derision? “It ain’t ‘cool’ to hate black people no more. Let’s go after them non-binary kids!”

We have seen a dramatic spike in hate crimes against transgender people. The numbers of anti-trans attacks jumped 29 percent in 2021 over the numbers in 2020. There has been a corresponding increase in anti-trans murders, with black trans women being the primary target. Fueling this wave of hate is a bizarre obsession from many Republican politicians who delight in finding ways to make the lives of transgender Americans hell, especially if they are kids. According to translegislation.com, 2023 has already seen 499 anti-trans bills in 49 states (thank you, Delaware), and 43 that have passed.

How did transgender people suddenly become the demographic that it was politically expedient to hate?

If I’ve leaned anything in my 30+ years of studying hate groups, hate mongers never miss a passing bandwagon. In the 1920s, the “America First” Ku Klux Klan pivoted from anti-black hate to anti-immigrant hate as immigration patterns shifted to bring waves of Catholics and Jews to our shores. In the 1980’s, the KKK got in on the anti-gay hysteria as the AIDS epidemic gripped the country. A few years ago, hate groups leveled up their anti-Semitism as a means of going after Anthony Fauci and any Jewish doctor who thought it might be a good idea to wear a mask. Now that COVID has subsided, it seems to be transgender folks who are in the crosshairs of those that are perpetually angry about something that doesn’t actually affect them.

Let me put an underline on that point. If you are not transgender, another person being transgender has absolutely no impact on you one way or another. There are probably about 1.6 million trans people in the United States (according to a recent UCLA study). You don’t have to do anything or not do anything. Just let them exist. Just like we do with left-handed people (who right-handed people used to think were evil). Fox News would have you believe there is an army of transgender backstrokers competing on girls swim teams. These are the same people who previously wouldn’t shut up about “black rapists” and “Jewish pedophiles.” There’s not. And if there is one or two trans athletes raising the bar, it doesn’t effect you or Travis Tritt.

So why are rednecks across America pouring Bud Light down the drain and trying to find a “less gay” shitty beer? (Good luck on that one, Cleatus.)

Here’s two explanations.

First is the obvious one. Right-wing politicians, like Florida Nazi-wannabe Ron DeSantis, are using transphobia to gin up their white evangelical base. Let’s not forget the previously mentioned white-evangelical outfit known as the Ku Klux Klan. There’s a grip of white Christians that don’t know that Jesus was a brown-skinned socialist and think the Lord approved on shitting on marginalized people instead of gifting them loaves and fishes. This group is easier to manipulate than a prom full of horny teenagers. All you have to do is mention “sex” and “children” and the pitchfork and torch-carrying villagers are officially triggered. 

Let’s be clear. Kids are more at risk from child molesting preachers than drag queens or anybody in the entire LGBTQ community. The religious right thinks transgender people are “sexualizing” kids. Not anymore than sex crazed cis-gender heterosexual people are. Everywhere I look I see those folks sucking face. I’ve already written about how not-kid friendly TV shows like Family Feud are. Trying to protect my 8-year-old from the nonstop sexuality coming from the non-queer folks is a losing battle. Someone expressing their gender is not “sexuality,” it’s life. And trans kids are dying by not being allowed to do it by an opportunistic political movement that sacrifices them at the alter of MAGA votes.

Second is a cognitive reason and has to do with our less-evolved friends who are firing on their knee jerk lizard brains. Research shows that these limbic brain creatures cannot handle complexity. Everything has to be in a very black or white binary. These are the same folks who feared “mulattos” and “quadroons” a hundred and fifty years ago. You had to fit into a nice racial category so they knew where to put you. Now that over 9 million Americans (including my daughter) are biracial they’ve moved onto to another anal retentive need to put people in a box.

To be fair, the last few decades America has been on a public education project to learn that sex and gender are two completely different concepts. We’ve spent so long conflating biological sex with sociological expressions of gender, you can’t fault folks for having trouble disentangling them. (“Gender reveal parties” are not. Genital reveal but not gender.) But we’re fully past that point now. Anyone who has a brain developed enough to understand the complexity of reality (“One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter”) gets that gender can be extremely fluid and doesn’t exist in a neat either/or binary. So we’re left with troglodytes, like Kid Rock, who flip out when “dude looks like a lady.” Their brains just cannot manage boundary bending. Take the Bud Light banning morons back to 1883 and they would have coming for biracial people with ropes. Have you ever seen Birth of a Nation (1915)? “Those mulattoes are sexualizing our children!!”

The saddest part of this political fad is that there is already a body count. Trans kids who can’t get gender affirming care have an elevated suicided rate. Trans people suffer from all kinds of health problems because of inequities in our health care system (just ask a trans man with ovarian cancer). Physical attacks on trans people has now taken on a sport-like aspect. There was a brutal murder here in suburban Portland in 2001. The killing of a trans woman named Lani Kai became a focal point of my early hate crime work here in Oregon. The good news is her murder would now be classified as a bias crime in Oregon, but the bad news is her murder is still unsolved 22 years later and joins the increasing number of case files that end up with trans women of color (and other queer folks) chilling in the morgue.

There is a historical parallel the maps the current anti-trans hysteria to the hundred and sixteen years of lynching African-Americans after slavery ended in 1865. The thousands of racial lynchings were driven by an irrational fear, that somehow black people were an existential (and sexual) threat to white people. The modern irrational fear, bubbling over in bastions of hate like Texas, Tennessee, and Florida, is that transgender people are a threat to cisgender people. They’re not. They are human beings. The rest is convenient hysteria and it’s fueling the Republican death cult. Where southern Democrats championed the dehumanization of black people a hundred years ago, MAGA Republicans are now dehumanizing transgender people and it has to stop.

Now, I’m all for donating Kid Rock’s brain to science or sending thoughts and prayers into the void that one of Ron DeSantis’s three kids comes out as non-binary, but what I want to do is just beg the MAGA base to chill the fuck out and find a social problem that actually impacts them, like full access to healthcare or full access to lite beer. Whatever. Just leave trans kids alone.

How to Be Less White

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

April 6, 2023

White supremacy is a real thing. Let me be more specific, white supremacy in 2023 is a very real thing. And it’s not just Klansmen and whoever pays the “Blacks for Trump” guy to stand behind the GOP’s favorite felon at every rally. It’s in all of us who have grown up in a society that brainwashes us to believe “white” is the standard to judge all other races by. If you think Jesus Christ was a white dude, you are a victim of internalized white supremacy. And White Jesus has done more damage than any Klan rally ever could.

I shouldn’t have to convince you of the damage all this white supremacy has done on people of color. From the Mexican-American woman who is considered “fiery” Latina to the black man bleeding in the middle of the street because police assumed he had a gun, and a trillion other examples of micro-aggressions, discrimination, bias crimes, and hate groups dreaming of genocide, I shouldn’t have to convince you. But if you are a white person who thinks racism magically vanished in the 1960s and all this is liberal fantasy, just read any account by a person of color. (I have been reminded that it is not black people’s job to educate white people about reality.) And don’t you dare say, “I was raised to be colorblind,” because you weren’t.

This isn’t about how white supremacy hurts BIPOC folks. It’s about how white supremacy hurts white folks.

As a feminist scholar, much of my work centers around how patriarchy hurts men. Yes, we benefit greatly from it, but it also squeezes us into a small box called “masculinity,” where you better not “cry like a girl,” and solving a problem “like men” means beating the shit out of each other. There’s a reason women live, on average, seven years longer than men. Whether it’s young men popping wheelies in crotch rockets on the interstate or older men not going to the doctor to have that lump looked at, men’s internalized sexism presents them infinite stupid ways to die. We are afraid to be vulnerable and it is killing us in droves.

Similarly, white supremacy puts us white people in a bland box. The monster of American assimilation screams at non-WASPs to do their damndest to look, think, act, pray, and eat as WASPy as possible. But his “melting pot” con also burns people of European origin. It tells them to give up their ethnic identity and morph into this imaginary, but powerful, thing called “white people.” How many times have you heard a white person describe themselves as an ethnic “mutt”? Whites gain entry into an elite county club but the price is their beautiful culture.

The category of white people is a relatively recent invention. There were no white people before the late 17th century. There were European people but there were no white people because there are no people who are the color white. (Ghosts not withstanding.) White people were invented to distinguish themselves from “black” Africans (who are also not the color black) to rationalize the dehumanization of Africans for the purpose of chattel slavery. The invention assured that even the most impoverished white person would perpetually hold power over the masses of earthlings now defined as “non-white.”

So how can we help “white” people escape the yoke of slave master?

There are three parts to this strategy. The first two must be undertaken before the third can even be considered as an option. The first is the need to acknowledge the expansive privilege that goes along with being considered white. Not only are you white folks more likely to get the job and less likely to be profiled by the police, you’re more likely to not have to think about the issue of race. Ever. This extends to the shade bias of colorism. Barack Obama has had it a lot easier than Jesse Jackson. My bi-racial daughter presents as “white,” and will escape much of the hell her Mexican cousins would endure in the same settings.

Second is the importance of taking an active anti-racist life position. Don’t tell me, “I’m not a racist.” That’s crap. Internalized white supremacy makes us all racist to a degree. I am a life-long anti-racist educator. I would never say I’m not racist. The question is, what are you doing to fight the evil of racism? And if you are “white,” what are you doing to dismantle your privilege? If you are a liberal white person and you think listening to Beyoncé and putting a Black Lives Matter sign in your yard is enough, you are part of the problem. Roll up your damn sleeves and get to work, even if is just unpacking your own internalized white supremacy.

OK, here’s the payoff that will make your white lives matter. Stop thinking of yourself as a white person and reclaim your ethnicity!

Even if you are “mutt,” you have an ethnic identity somewhere in your family line. And ethnicity, unlike race, is culture and food and music and history and celebration. My last name, Blazak, is an Americanized Slavic name. My great grandfather came to America in 1891 from Prague (at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and the assimilation started. My mother’s family were English immigrants in the 1770s. According to genetic test 23 and Me, I’m a quarter Czech and a whole bunch of other stuff (including 1% middle eastern!). So I chose Slavic as my primary cultural identity.

Rediscovering my Slavic roots has been liberating, from diving into the rich history of Czechoslovakian literature to helping my daughter make Polish pierogis each Christmas, there is so much to uncover. The de-assimilation includes learning about my family’s buried Catholic history and the heroism of my Slavic cousins in tearing down the Iron Curtain. I first travelled to Prague in 1991 and immediately felt a part of the land of the Velvet Revolution. My connection to that people was a major factor in my decision to head to Ukraine last spring to help people who physically looked like many family members. I learned, while I was there, that there is a small Polish town on the Ukraine border called Błażek, the likely starting place of my great grandfather’s clan. I don’t have to suffer from ethnic envy. I have an ethnicity and it’s wonderful. (Now if I could just perfect the polka.)

White people get a small version of this every St. Patrick’s Day, when they struggle to identify some lone Irish chromosome in their DNA. “My great grandmother’s wet nurse was from Killarney! Give me a beer!” On March 17th each year, white people briefly discover they are “ethnic.” What if we did that everyday?

There’s a good chance that if you are in the white people club, you have more than one ethic history in your family tree. That’s even better. Spend some time shopping from the menu and pick the one that most speaks to you. (Helpful hint: Pick the one with the best food and the fewest slave traders.) “White pride” is racist A.F., but “French pride” is cool as shit! Start finding restaurants, festivals and events that cater to your new ethnicity. You will see me every August at Portland’s Polish Festival drinking pilsners with my fellow Slavs, gorging on plates of latkes.

So stop being white. You have so much to gain by being your chosen ethnicity. And if you are adopted, even better! Just choose a random ethnicity out of a hat! (I might suggest Czech as a good option.) Stop with the self-defeating “mutt” business that forgoes your rich ethnic history for the power mad invention of whiteness.

Racists often ask me, “Why do you hate white people?” Obviously, I don’t. I hate whiteness and what that social construction has levied on the world. Europeans and European-Americans have done many amazing things. The invention of the bidet, for example. White people, as a category, have propped up centuries of violent oppression. That’s not a club I want to be a part of.

So help me destroy it.

Death By a Thousand 9/11s

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

September 11, 2021

They say one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. From the perspective of a lowly stormtrooper inside the Death Star, Luke Skywalker and his band of rebel fighters, guided by an archaic religion, were not heroes, but mass murderers. Was the U.S drone strike that targeted ISIS-K in Kabul on August 29th a part of our righteous war on terror or was it a terrorist attack that killed seven children (and no ISIS fighters)? Remember when Bill Maher said, on his show Politically Incorrect, the 9/11 hijackers were not cowards, but those who launch cruise missiles from 2000 miles away were and ABC canned him? Are we even allowed to ask these questions?

Today is not the day to debate whether or not the attacks twenty years ago were terrorism. They most certainly were. If they weren’t, the word has no meaning. Anyone who was alive and old enough to pay attention on September 11, 2001 (and now a quarter of Americans weren’t), felt the terror. I had just flown to Atlanta on 9/10 for my 20th high school reunion and my dad woke me up in time for me to see the second plane slam into the World Trade Center. I remember saying out loud, “What the hell is happening?” as Peter Jennings attempted to translate the untranslatable. It was about to get worse. Much worse.

The U.S. government defines terrorism as, ““the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives” (28 C.F.R. Section 0.85). Much of my work is built around the description of hate crimes as acts of terrorism. Why do we not think of the 9/11 attacks as merely 2,977 murders? Because all Americans were the targets. I had a friend from college who was in Tower 1. Osama bin Laden didn’t know about him, or have anything against him personally. (Three of my former Emory classmates were killed in the New York attacks.) He was a random target, a death meant to intimidate a larger civilian population. And it worked. It was several months after 9/11 before I could enter a tall building or drive over a Portland bridge without thinking of a passenger plane crashing into it.

Hate crimes work the same way. Like the victims of 9/11, targets are randomly selected for their symbolic value, to coerce others like the targets that they aren’t wanted here. Leave. A burning cross, a gay bashing, a swastika on a synagogue, all meant to terrorize large populations. After the 9/11 attacks hate crimes against American Arabs and Muslim (and people perceived to be Arab and/or Muslim) increased 500%. Four days after the attack a Sikh named Balbir Singh Sodhi was shot in the head in a gas station in Mesa, Arizona by a white male who claimed he seeking revenge for the 9/11 attacks. Not only were Arab and Muslim-Americans living in fear, but so were Sikhs and others. (Here in Portland, an Italian man was beaten by three teenagers after the attacks because he was perceived to be Middle Eastern.) 2001 wasn’t an anomaly. Just this week, data released but the FBI revealed that hate crimes increased dramatically in 2020. Who is terrorizing whom?

On this sad occasion, I’m reminded of how the Bush-Cheney-Halliburton Administration tried to falsely pin 9/11 on Saddam Hussein, leading to the invasion of the wrong county, a protracted and completely unnecessary war that was responsible for the death in over 4000 U.S. troops, and over half a million Iraqi men, women, and children killed. But we were the ones fighting terrorism. We couldn’t possibly be the terrorists. Could we?

I visited Ground Zero the summer following the attack and I could still smell the dust of all the souls who had been atomized on that Tuesday in September. I’ve been to New York at least a dozen times since then and always notice what’s not there and what is. My recurring 9/11 dreams were central to my 2016 novel, The Dream Police. At the 9/11 memorial when I see the names of the victims who were pregnant women, I can’t help but convulse and every trip I make to Washington DC, I have a moment when I wonder what would have happened if the fourth plane had hit its intended target, the U.S. Capitol building. I carry this as trauma as does every American, to varying degrees, who remembers that day.

But we also carry the trauma of all the other acts of terrorism, many done in our name or done by people who look like us against people who don’t look like us. We’ve become blasé to the trauma and really good at rationalizing the traumatizing of others. We’ve become masters at dehumanizing the “other.” They see us as “infidels” and we see them as “fanatics.” They see us as “libtards” and we see them as “Nazis.” Nobody is just a human being capable of love and redeemable imperfection. If you told members of the radical right or the radical left they could push a button to launch a drone strike to wipe out the other side, the air would be filled robots on their death trips.

Trauma requires healing and there has been a lot of healing in the last 20 years. New Yorkers are resilient. The passengers on Flight 93 showed great courage in the face of their own deaths. And the work of the war machine that launches drone strikes into wherever continues at the Pentagon. But the healing is hampered by all the other terror we inflict on each other. An open wound never truly heals.

I will never forget that day. The confusion of wondering if it was real or a movie. The image of people choosing to jump rather than burn. The realization that the world would never be the same. But I will also never forget a lot of other things, including what happened in a Mesa, Arizona gas station four days after the attack and what happened two weeks ago in Kabul. Never forget any of it.

Standing at the Border: Experiencing Xenophobia Through My Wife’s Skin

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

April 15, 2021

Monday was harder than I thought it would be. We’re on a cross-country family road trip, driving from Atlanta to Portland, via Savannah and New Orleans. Part of our route was designed to skirt the Mexican border to find the spot my wife crossed into America when she was a child. Andi is a brilliant writer, working on a book on the immigrant experience so that stop was crucial.

While it was nice to see the Trump signs gone, whenever you drive through the South, there’s always racial tension. Andi got a death stare from a white woman in a Waffle House in southern Alabama who was probably also triggered by the fact our six-year-old daughter was wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt. We probably fooled ourselves into thinking we left that bigotry behind when we crossed from Louisiana to the formerly Mexican territory known as “Texas.”

We started Monday in a Red Roof Inn in El Paso, awoken when a white guy drove his Toyota through a wall in the room below ours and then calmly drove away. I’ve made it a habit on my cross country drives to stop by famous crimes scenes that I lecture about. (In 2009, I made an entire Portland to Atlanta to Portland trip based on over 40 crime scenes.) But this wasn’t about me. It was about Andi and how she experienced the day and all the people that didn’t live to experience the day. That’s why our first stop was one of the worst crime scenes of all.

On our way out of El Paso, we stopped at the Walmart where a 21-year old white supremacist went on a shooting spree, killing 23 people and injuring 23 others. After posting an anti-immigrant manifesto that referenced the xenophobic rhetoric of President Trump on 8chan, he drove from Dallas to El Paso with the express purpose of killing Latinx people. Semi-automatic rifle in hand and activated by Trump’s alarm about an “immigrant invasion,” he began firing in the parking lot and then walked into the store, shooting every brown person in his path. It became America’s worst hate crime. It was in 2019 and you probably haven’t heard much about it since it happened. After all they were only brown people.

I walked into the Walmart and asked a police officer (whom I was glad to see) if there was a memorial to the victims of that day. She said it wasn’t much of a memorial, but it was on the far side of the parking lot, facing I-10. Andi, Cozy, and I walked over to what was a large metal candle, with a plaque in English and Spanish. It was stark but effective and brought Andi to tears. The names of the victims were the names of her people, including one who shared a name with her father who passed away a few weeks ago. She couldn’t go into the store itself because it would be filled with people who looked like her, like the people who were killed that day. It was a superstore-sized reminder of the hatred of hispanic people. And Walmart still sells guns.

I could feel the pain in Andi’s body and, as a white person, all I could do is say I was sorry for the hate and ignorance of white people and pledged to do this work on bias crimes with more fervor.

Then we hit the road for New Mexico and got off I-10 in Arizona to take backroads to Douglas, which is across the border from Agua Prieta, the place Andi crossed from in 1998. As soon as we got off the highway, we began to see Border Patrol trucks, La Migra, on the hunt. There was even a lonely National Guardsman, shirt on his head to protect himself from the sun, leaning against a vehicle holding up a giant surveillance camera. The news had just come in that President Biden was working with the Mexican government to “strengthen” border security. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Andi crossed in the middle of the night so this daytime view gave her another perspective of the harsh nature of the land she walked across as an 8-year-old. It also began to trigger memories of sage brush branches cutting her skin. I could see her body change as we got closer to the border, the hard journey coming back to her. We reflected on the thousands of people who died trying to reach a better life, 7,000 since since Andi crossed. (2020 being the worst year on record for migrant deaths, but that’s what Trump and his people wanted.)

Douglas is a quaint little town that appears out of the vast desert, full of franchised America, like McDonalds and, of course, Walmart, and completely populated by Latino-Americans who probably long for the days when the open border was a reality and nobody (including white people thousands of miles away) cared about it. We stopped by a playground so Cozy could stretch her legs. The wall with Mexico was a hundred feet away. I just watched Andi smell the air and look at the faces of the people living their life in a border town.

After picking up some tacos, we headed west to try to find the exact spot where my wife entered the country. We found a road off of Highway 80 called W. Paul Spur Road that took us to a dirt road simply called Border Road. As we approached the border a massive wall emerged. The Trump wall. We stopped on the side of the road to have our tacos and let Andi walk in the brush that she made her way through when she was a child. I took a video of Cozy standing in the wind as her mother felt a flood of emotions. She became nervous about being there as Border Patrol helicopters and planes flew over our heads. Her first night in that place she and her group were captured by the Border Patrol, detained and taken back across the border. She was unsure of going any farther, but I urged her to make it to that point, the eternal return.

We drove all the way to the newly constructed wall, with it’s erection date written on it, 10-10-20. Trump’s last act of anti-immigrant violence, less than a month before election day. How many more would die because of that wall? Slow painful deaths. Children dying without water, in the cold desert night. Parents who just want to work and find a better future for their families, alone, to become bones in the sand. I watched Andi reach through the slats in the wall to the Mexican side, touching the air of her home. She placed a picture on herself on the other side. On the back of it she had written, “Yo crucé” (I crossed). “I just want to give hope to someone like me,” she said.

We stood at the wall for a while, taking it in, taking pictures, including one of Andi and Cozy that seemed to bookmark the night Andi and her mother crossed. The weight of it all was on her. The weight of all those who died alone in the desert and the weight of a hateful nation that chanted “build a wall.” I thought about all the amazing people who would not be adding to American culture because of that wall or because they died trying to make it to their American dream. Andi just said, “If this had been here then, I probably wouldn’t be here now.”

The Border Patrol helicopter must have become suspicious that we were going to smuggle some migrants in our Prius and became more present, so we put the border wall in the review mirror. About 500 miles later we were in Las Vegas, where the water dances in fountains and the deaths on the border and in El Paso Walmarts are never thought of. But we will think of them and more.

2019 in Review – 22 Snapshots and an Impeachment

~ Randy Blazak ~ Leave a comment

December 31, 2019

I guess I’ve been a crummy blogger this year. When Cozy was a baby, I could squeeze out a couple of blogposts a week on everything from housework to feminist cowboy movies. In 2019, I only managed 22 posts. To be fair, I actually taught full-time the entire year. It felt good to be back at work. My wonderful students got to be the recipients of my random thoughts about the state of the world. And now that Cozy is a kindergartener, typing up cohesive essays is more of a luxury. Plus, I’ve spent much of my spare time chasing squirrels out of our attic.

I was excited that my writing still had an audience even though every single post wasn’t about Trump’s racism. My tribute to my late friend (and Atlanta punk icon) David Dickens had the most reads (1,900). My piece on the Christchurch killings was reprinted in The Peace Chronicle, which was a great privilege.

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2018 was a year of global travel. For 2019, I managed to stay mostly on the West Coast, with a few weeks in Mexico to give a couple of lectures in my favorite anthropology field school. I still managed plenty of world media appearances (especially CNN International), but my favorite media interview was when a rare tornado came right down our street. Under my name, instead of usual “HATE CRIME EXPERT” it said, “LIVES NEAR DOWNED TREE.” Much more exciting than an appearance in Turkish TV (which I also did in 2019).

Of course the driving theme of the year was growing blackhole being created by our idiot president, culminating in his impeachment on December 18. By that point I had written so many posts about his inevitable impeachment that the actual thing was anticlimactic and I didn’t even bother to comment on it. (I do wonder what will happen to all the ITMFA t-shirts that are so common here in Portland.) I’m sure I’ll have plenty to say as the divide widens even further in 2020, with Trump loyalists promising civil war if they don’t get their way. It’s like the country is being taken over by hordes of fascist babies.

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For me, the focus of 2019 was on my family. Working steadily gave me a better foundation to be grounded in the real and not the endless yammering on social media. My classes Portland Community College and my CLE trainings for attorneys gave me the professional connections I craved and I got to work on a few murder cases that let me to put my skills to work in very important arenas. This allowed me to not worry too much about financial issues, and focus on being present for Andrea and Cozy. Maybe the best moment was taking Cozy on a surprise trip to Disney in LA that included a stop at their animation studios where a friend showed her the work he was completing on Frozen 2. There was also a trip to Las Vegas to see The Beatles’ LOVE, twice! Family times was its own reward.

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The coming year will have plenty challenges. I imagine I will be commenting directly on the rise of anti-Semitic violence and the Trump cult’s threats to peace and equality. But my personal agenda will be focused on making good educational choices for my daughter, showing my wife how much I cherish her, and finally getting the squirrels out of the attic.

2019 WTW Posts

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“Thanks, punk!” (For David Dickens) (January 10, 2019)

Watching fragile men freak out over a Gillette ad (January 17, 2019)

Raising Honest Children in the Age of Trump (January 25, 2019)

A silly love song for my wife (February 14, 2019)

The Wisdom of Double Nickels: On Turning 55(February 22, 2019)

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On not dying youngish(March 5, 2019)

He Killed My Child: Meditations on Christchurch and the Sociopathy of White Supremacy (March 19, 2019)

I have found what I was looking for, Bono.(April 14, 2019)

Globalization and Nationalism: Get Ready for More Fascist Violence(April 28, 2018)

This War on Women and a Strategy to Defend Choice (May 20, 2019)

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Just Open the Damn Border (June 18, 2019)

Female Role Models For My Daughter (and all those boys) (July 7, 2019)

How Do You Solve a Racist Problem like Donald? (July 17, 2019)

Lita was one cool cat.(July 26, 2019)

Your loved one was just killed by an angry white man with a gun. OK?(August 4, 2019)

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Matterhorn not withstanding, we have a 5-year old (August 29, 2019)

Your biography is history: Taking in the Trump impeachment (October 3, 2019)

White People: If you aren’t actively anti-racism, you are pro-racism (October 23, 2019)

I was 5 once, too!(November 27, 2019)

Reelin’ in the Tens: What was this decade about anyway? (December 29, 2019)

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 Dad’s Top Discs of 2019 (December 30, 2019)

2019 in Review – 22 Snapshots and an Impeachment (December 31, 2019)

 

How Do You Solve a Racist Problem like Donald?

~ Randy Blazak ~ 2 Comments

July 17, 2019

After this week, if you don’t think Donald Trump is a racist, you might be a white nationalist. I’ve been interviewing avowed white supremacists for over 30 years and when I do there is two things they ALWAYS say:

  1. I’m not a racist. (I just love my people.)
  2. If you don’t like the way things are you can go back to where you came from.

Only the most sub-moronic of rednecks and Trump apologists do not recognize Trump’s latest hissy fit about Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashid Tlaib is rooted in tried and true racist tropes. Ask any person of color (including Mitch McConnell’s wife) what they hear when a white person tells them to “go back where they came from.” Trump is a racist. Every free-thinking person knows it.

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I started writing about Trump’s use of racist tactics in 2015 and it’s only gotten worse. I know plenty of former proudly white supremacist organizers who had a reckoning of conscience and are now the most bad-ass anti-racist activists.  At 73, I won’t expect any moment of redemption from the current occupant of the White House. Don’t expect Donald Trump to sign up to be rescued by the good people at Life After Hate. He’s going to carry this diseased bone to his grave like the old dog that he is. It’s not worth trotting out the evidence to convince the unconvinced. Those people are idiots and/or racists themselves.

So we have a virulently racist president who will probably have the bully pulpit until he is sworn out of office on January 20, 2021. (I’m still hoping he’ll just quit like a bloated Nixon.) What do we do about it? How do we adapt to the fact that the office of the President of the United States of America is caked in hundred year old pig shit?

FIRST – There are real victims of Trump’s racism. There are traumatized children at the border because they have been ripped from their parents seeking to protect them from the violence of their home countries. There are families traumatized through prolonged separation because of his “Muslim ban.” There are increasing numbers of Americans traumatized by hate crimes, as the racists who worship Trump scream, “Go back to where you came from!” as they harass and beat and shoot them. The most important thing is to protect, defend, and heal these people until the source of Trumpism is confined to the trash heap of history.

I was a Boy Scout and we were taught to take care of the least among us. “We’re only as strong as our weakest link,” we’d say. We learned that from the American armed forces. I grew up thinking that was an American value. When I watch Trump throw red meat to his rabid base, I wonder if we’re still America or if we’ve become ancient Rome. This is not America. We have to defend those who are the targets of his fear mongering. We have to be willing to stand on the tracks of the Trump train and say, “No more!”

SECOND – Obviously, Trump is not a unifier. He has made America 1861 again. We have never been more divided. We need to resist the divide & conquer tactics. The new rebel finds common ground.

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His moronic refrain is that if you have a problem with America, “you can just leave.” Does he really think that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does not love this country? Or is that just what he thinks his cult of supporters want him to think? In the 1960s, right-wingers would chant, “America! Love it or leave it!” to civil rights marchers and anti-war protestors. The more rational reply was, “America! Love it and fix what’s broken!” I had a lot of fun ten years ago telling Tea Partiers, who where always complaining about President Obama, “America! Love it or leave it!” The irony sailed right over their thick skulls. It didn’t accomplish anything but it was fun.

I’ll admit the divisiveness can be fun. I can go all in for a good Facebook fight. But that only serves Trump and his Russian troll overlords. They want chaos. Remember when Jeb Bush called Trump the “chaos candidate”? Shocker: Jeb Bush was right. The antidote is political civility and unity. It was encouraging to see several Republicans sign on to the congressional condemnation of Trump’s most recent racist tirade. There may still be a shadow of a spine in the GOP. We need more of that. And just not unity in clapping back at the Dear Leader.

There is good research about political civility. It can happen. I know it seems impossible right now but we need to build bridges not walls. There’s a great Special AKA song from 1984 that goes, “If you’ve got a racist friend, now is the time for that friendship to end.” It’s wrong. As much as I want to unfriend people who blather about Trump not being racist (please stop), I want to keep them on board. Keep them engaged. Find ways in. Free them from their bigotry. Bring them to the light side of the Force.

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THIRD – We need to remove Donald Trump by whatever constitutional means possible, including the ballot box. The damage this madman is causing our great nation will take generations to repair. 2020 can’t be about third parties and “voting your conscience.” Ross Perot is dead. There is too much at stake. Whoever the Democratic nominee is, you’re gonna have complaints. “He’s too old!” “She prosecuted too many people of color!” “I can’t pronounce his name!” Shut the fuck up. Get out your debit card and make a contribution. Put a bumper sticker on your Uber. Hold your nose and vote. There are kids in cages. If I meet a single “anarchist” in 2020 who tells me they are not voting because elections are bullshit, I will personally hand them over to their Russian troll puppetmasters. We need everyone, including frustrated Republicans and youth in Che Guevara t-shirts (Made in China, no doubt). We need the sophistics and the folks who never pay attention to politics. We need a massive rebuke of this very anti-American American president.

It’s not worth it to debate Trump’s racism. Too many credible people (Thank you, Don Lemon) have already done it. The question now is who are we as a nation? Are we going to tolerate a tinpot dictator who wants to make America Jim Crow again, or are we going to stand for the great promise of our country holds for all people in the world? You must choose.

The Wisdom of Double Nickels: On Turning 55

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

February 22, 2019

Sometimes I think the whole thing about the “wisdom of our elders” is a lot of poppycock to make the aged feel better about their bodies sputtering out. Maybe among native tribal people, the old lady who remembered what plants not to eat was a needed resource, but now there’s an app for that. Sometimes I feel completely clueless in this fast moving culture. (So I can’t call myself an “ally,” right?) And then I see these Generation Z kids from Parkland, or the ones marching for the environment in Europe today, who seem straight up on top of it. What wisdom do I have to offer them?

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I turned 55 this week. I was born in February 1964 as Beatlemania tried to heal the nation after the JFK assassination. (I was a 6 month old fetus on that dark day.) I was born into the light of the 60s, 1964 being a year when the world turned on a Roosevelt dime. I had a great birthday that started with my 4-year-old singing “Happy Birthday” to me, and included a rare sunny Portland winter day, two lectures on white collar crime, an interview with CNN about women escaping ISIS, an amazing concert by my old college friend Amy Ray (also born in 1964) and ending with a nightcap with my beautiful wife in our favorite local bar. What started in 1964 with “I Want to Hold Your Hand” ended with “Life is good but I want to go to bed.”

What kernel of wisdom should be gleaned from all that in-between? What have I learned in those over 20,000 days? Lots, especially about race, gender, and the privilege I hold. But there is a newer insight born of the news cycle that I think my younger friends don’t know yet.

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The Jussie Smollett story is heartbreaking. Lying about being a victim of hate crime to advance your career hurts every single legitimate victim of hate. The incident on the Washington mall with the Native American protestor and the MAGA-wearing hat boys was confusing. Those kids seemed like entitled little pricks. Here in Portland there is a scandal involving a police officer who was texting the leader of an alt-right group which has been frustrating. It sure seems like the cops were cozying up to the fascists.

Not so fast. Just not so fast to any news story. People were CONVINCED Smollett was an actual victim. They were convinced the MAGA kids were harassing the Native elder. Here in Portland they are convinced the police are in bed with Neo-Nazis. There is a rush to judgment when a news story fits our pre-existing narrative. It’s proof! We’re right! Just click this link!

So at 55, I’m pledging to reserving judgment until all the facts are in, even if it reduces the ammo for my side. My radical take on things will survive even if Smollett lied about his attack, the MAGA kids were not being malicious to that Native American, and the Portland officer was just conducting standard crowd control procedures. (He also texted an antifa protestor – gasp!) 

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Portland recently had another little drama with the city council deciding whether or not to stay on the Joint Terrorism Task Force. The JTTF emerged after 9/11 as a way for local and county law enforcement to have a relationship with the FBI on terrorism issues. The city has been on and off it depending on the political winds of the day. The task force doesn’t have a lot of success to boast about. There was a 2010 arrest of a Muslim kid who had been lured into a fake plot to blow up a downtown Christmas tree lighting. Last year a former FBI investigator testified to city council that the JTTF infringes on civil liberties, including of Muslim Americans. Seems like a mess.

A local paper called me for my opinion and I said I had no position on the matter, contrary to my left-wing and right-wing community members who definitely have an opinion. I just made the case that the “threat (of white extremism) is real and the Northwest has long been a center for that thinking. … There is a value in keeping the channels of communication open (between agencies) about what the real threat is.” But I was clear that I had no official position on Portland’s place on the JJTF. Well, that didn’t stop a city commissioner from claiming that I endorsed the city staying on the JTTF. So more kerfuffle for me! Yeah! There are already a host of left-wing activists who are convinced I’m a police collaborator. I had to laugh.

My seasoned perspective is now to resist the temptation to jump into the fight, even when it feels like I am being forced to pick a side. I’m a social scientist. We like as much data as possible before we decide there if is evidence to demonstrate support for a theory. Scientists never prove anything. Never. We know reality is complexity and the only certainty is chaos. The simplistic “us vs. them” narratives on the left and right make for great protest posters, but the truth is that we’re all in this mess together. It’s worth taking a beat to get all the facts. Anyone who is 100% cocksure of their position is a fool. I’m a radical agnostic. I defend my right to say that I don’t know.

Older and wiser but still radical. I still want to transform the misogynistic, ableist, white supremacist foundation of all reality as we know it. But I’m going to lay back a bit and let the fuller picture to come in to focus. I still have time for that. When I was younger I thought anyone who didn’t immediately man the barricades was an enemy. There is another route to the same goal. Take a breath.

 

The emotional fatigue of liberation work

~ Randy Blazak ~ 17 Comments

October 13, 2017

Sometimes I have to remind myself of my own advice. When we are trying to be allies or accomplices in liberation movements that are not about our liberation, there’s gonna be some big bumps in the road. It you’re a man who cares about smashing sexism or a white person who wants to dismantle racism, don’t expect to be welcomed with open arms as the great savior. I advise people to be prepared for uncomfortable situations and let folks know that they’re going to be mistakes. Don’t beat yourself up too much. Just stay on the path.

Most of my classmates at Emory University went off to Wall Street, or law school, or medical school and are now making six and seven figure incomes and probably vote Republican. I chose a different path. My road has been to dedicate my life to unmasking and upturning forms of oppression in my world. It started the day I turned my back on the Klan town I grew up in and really took off when I began my undercover research in the white supremacist subculture. That path may have earned me a PhD and some media notoriety, but I’ve also got over 30 years of committed racists threatening to kill me and attacking me in ways that have severely impacted my family.

A white activist friend recently said we do this anti-racism work because we have to and she was exactly right. This work is woven into my being now, but I still have a lot to learn. For my senior high school ring I chose Mother of Pearl for the stone as a subtle nod to the “white power” vibes in my school. That was 1981. By 1984, I was working on Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign. I just needed that first sociology class to help me understand how I had become an agent of others’ oppression. I cast off that yoke but all these years later, there is still more to learn and it gets hard at times. I can’t count the number of racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic, agist, classist (and whatever the body-shaming “ist” is) things I’ve done or said over the years.

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To do this work is to deal with emotional fatigue because you never “win.” There’s always another battle and you wonder (especially with a president who today is speaking at a conference of an actual hate group) if any progress has been made. I was at the Portland Max train station last a May after the brutal attack by an alt-right racist that left two men dead and a third clinging to life. I was taking in the candles, flowers, and messages in what had become a makeshift memorial to these three Portland heroes. I suddenly was overwhelmed with desperation. What was the point of my decades of work on this issue if people are still being murdered by Nazis? Had I wasted all this effort? I was going to be a dentist. It was 2017 and the hate mongers were stronger than ever with an ally in the White House. I walked towards some shadows so I could bawl my eyes out.

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I do regular educational tours with the Fair Housing Council of Oregon. We put a bunch of people on big Blue Star bus and drag them on a tragical history tour of Portland. Here’s where the black community was redlined, then displaced by “urban renewal” and gentrification. Here’s where Japanese-American men, women, children, and babies were imprisoned as “enemy aliens” after Pearl Harbor. Here’s where a community of working class people were wiped out by a catastrophic flood. We visit the spot where Mulugeta Seraw was beaten to death with a baseball bat by racist skinheads in 1988, and around the corner is the Hollywood Max station, site of the 2017 version of the same damn thing. We finish at Clyde’s Prime Rib, the great jazz bar and restaurant that in the 1940s was the Coon Chicken Inn. After the four hour tour, half of the bus riders look like they want to slit their wrists. It’s draining and deflating.

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In this work, I’m used to being attacked by people on the right. It comes with the territory. White supremacists have labeled be a “race traitor” and were doxxing me long before that was even a word. Conservatives call me a “libtard,” and a communist and are convinced that white privilege is a hoax and that discussions of implicit bias is a liberal tool to generate a false white guilt.

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It’s the attacks from the left that are more debilitating. It’s very in vogue for self-proclaimed radicals to bash “white liberals” these days, and much of it (as a self-proclaimed radical) I must say is deserved. As James Baldwin once said, “White people are trapped in a history they don’t understand.” But my work is about bringing people into liberation movements, so I worry attacking the people who are trying to be part of the solution will have an opposite effect. The (young) left can be very dogmatic and humorless, not allowing people to find the most effective path for themselves on this collective path. “Oh, you made an inappropriate comment? You’re out and I’m going to get my righteous posse to kick your ass out the door. Whose streets? Not yours.”

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I was on a panel this week for an amazing program called Race Talks; monthly community conversations about issues related to race and racism. This month’s talk was about how to be a white ally. The organizer called me and asked me to participate and who else should be on the panel. I suggested a young African-American activist who had recently been on my podcast. His position on the issue was provocative but important. My interview with him really helped me grow. So I was excited when we were all up on the stage together in front of a crowd so big they had to create an overflow room. I was prepared to talk about lessons learned about being a white ally and how to take a back seat in others’ liberation movements. I even wrote some notes. I never got to use them.

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Instead of the the woman who organized the panel moderating the discussion (as she had planned), our one black panelist decided he would ask the questions (in what could be framed as an act of male privilege). Questions like how the white people on the panel had burned people of color with their efforts to “help” and what reparations were we paying to make amends for our white privilege. I told you he was provocative. And these were important, valid questions. I’m not sure how it helped the standing-room-only crowd learn to be racial allies (in fact it probably scared a few folks away from the whole idea), but it certainly gave me one of those uncomfortable situations I encourage people to put themselves in.

One of his points is that his time is valuable and he should not be expected to help white people with their racism without compensation. I totally agree. Before the event, I messaged him and said I was looking forward to the panel. I wanted to thank him for taking the time to  be on my podcast. In the South we do that by buying folks beer.

Me: I owe you a beer. Let me buy you one tonight.

Him: I don’t drink.

Me: How about a salad. LOL

Him: I find salads offensive.

I made a joke about the salad. Apparently, I offended him. He trotted out this interchange to the packed room (and streaming on line) about “this white man” offering him a salad. I apologized for the offending comment and took it as a cue that I should probably think about my use of humor, something that has gotten me in trouble before. (I tried to acknowledge his point by getting out my wallet that only contained 3 bucks, which I placed on the table in front of him. In retrospect, that was probably seen as being a bit rude.) I really do think his point about being compensated for his efforts is valid. As the crowd thinned, some of the older African-Americans in the audience asked if I was okay. One said it was unfair that I had been ambushed like that. But I want to grow on these issues, so I’m trying to not go into a defensive mode and take everything as a learning experience.

I was still bruising when I got home and in true Trump fashion turned to Twitter and posted something that I would have not posted if I’d gone straight to bed.

“Tonight I learned what my white guilt cost”

Tweets don’t die quietly (just ask Donald). But I engaged in the conversation that lasted into the following morning. I learned a lot, including about the meaningful discussion of reparations. The income gap between whites and blacks due to generations of oppression is real and continues to widen. I believe that any reparations should come from the government (the collective “us”). It’s unfair to expect some poor white person to shoulder the responsibility. But there are lots of ways white people can participate that are meaningful.

Reparations site asks people to ‘offset your privilege’ with acts of kindness

I mentioned that I would address this issue in my blog and included a link to a recent blogpost on white privilege. I desperately wanted these fellow ant-racist activists to see I was not the enemy, just in a parallel lane on this journey. I got accused of invading a “black space” to promote my blog. It seemed anything I did or said, I was already convicted of being the bad guy. I was trying to understand their landscape, but I was somehow now the enemy. I offered to link my interview with this young activist to his PayPal account in hopes that people that listened would consider supporting his work through contributions. He said no. “I have been severely traumatized by your self-promotion over the last few days,” he wrote.

Sometimes you feel like you just can’t win. It sucks not being perfect in the eyes of others who apparently are perfect. Sometimes you are tempted to give up and let others do the work. When I was in grad school, I almost did my masters thesis on Appalachian quilt makers instead of Nazi skinheads. Think how different my life would be. Think of all the quilts I would have! But this is my life’s work, so I soldier on, learning from my mistakes.

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In the last few years I’ve learned the concept of “self care” and that it’s okay to be mindful of how hard this work can be and sometimes it’s okay to take a day off the fight and gorge on ice cream. One of the other panelists from that night, No Hate Zone founder Sam Sachs, called me to make sure I was alright after the panel/Twitter/Facebook public thrashing I got from my friends on the left. He told me my work is vitally important and has changed lives. It was just what I needed to hear.

To all those engaged in the struggle for human liberation, it is important that we keep each other’s feet to the fire, so we come from a place of empathy and not ego. It is also important to remember that we are all imperfect in our humanity and in our path to our common goals of equality, so treating each other with kindness and love is key. I am not one to suffers fools gladly, even when that fool is me. We can be hard on ourselves for our imperfections and mistakes and our failures. The moral arc of the universe is long, but we’ll get there. Give us a break.

And since this will likely be picked up by some of those young radicals who will confidently accuse me of being a “self-promoting” asshole, let me just say I love you and will see you a little further down the road.

Super important endnote: No matter how much fatigue a white person feels doing this work, it’s always going to be more fatiguing to be black in America. People of color don’t get to take a “self-care” day off.

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