Witness is not enough
Planes were falling from the sky and the sky itself was falling but didn’t the driveway still need shoveling? Salt for the icy steps. The kitchen sink full once again. And every day a new reminder that crying can get you anything you want in the world if it’s the right kind of crying. Tears of men weak enough to do grievous harm. I’m told that we can’t post our way out of fascism but they literally posted us right into it. Just another of the many unfair things about fascism. I watched a Family Feud the other night where Steve told one of the teams that they didn’t give him the answers on his card beforehand but he damn well knew what the answers were not. One of two scenarios have presented themselves which is that everything gets so bad so quickly that a sufficient response becomes inevitable or else they only get just so bad overtime that we can keep putting our duty off until it doesn’t matter anymore. I pick up my phone every five minutes expecting it to tell me something good about the world and I thought of a time some friends and I crawled around on all fours looking for crumbs of cocaine that had been accidentally brushed off the table into the carpet. I've been asking myself just how it is that a person can go about their day to day life at a time like this and I keep coming back to another question which is how did we ever manage to do so before this?
My God what a victory it would feel like at this point to merely have Trump as president without Musk involved. Remember when Donald Trump was president? The good old days! We didn't know how good we had it.
Annie Howard writes today about the forthcoming book The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity by Sarah Schulman. I think it's fair to say that solidarity in all of its known forms and some we haven't invented yet is something we're going to need a lot of in the near future.
More from me after that.
Howard previously wrote about a series of "incredibly diverse and incredibly gay museum and gallery shows" in Chicago.
Luke O’Neil
And also looked back on the anniversary of the Club Q nightclub shooting and reflected on growing up queer in Colorado Springs.
Luke O’Neil
Witness is not enough
by Annie Howard
Witness is not enough. Sixteen months of Palestinian genocide, beamed straight to our phones, has left many people in a state of endless shock, agog at images that defy any sense of basic human decency. Yet a sense of resigned, hopeless outrage, particularly amongst those of us watching at a safe distance, is not enough to stop the needless slaughter of a captive population in Gaza. Instead it has been the brave actions of millions of people, most tangibly those Palestinians on the front lines of their own survival, that has gotten us as far as this tenuous ceasefire, one still so far removed from real justice for everyone already killed by Israeli forces.
“When we see another person being brutalized, scapegoated, marginalized, blamed for things they have not caused, falsely accused, punished unjustly, shunned, subjected to oppressive state intervention, displaced, incarcerated, or threatened with murder, and that person is asking us to help, I believe that we each have a responsibility to intervene.” To intervene, with whatever we have available to us, is what matters most to Sarah Schulman, whose latest book, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity, asks those of us still able to step in what we are willing to lose in opposition to so much cruelty.
Out in April, Schulman’s latest salvo is a natural continuation of many of the key themes that have animated her work over the years, particularly in the string of nonfiction books she’s penned since Israel/Palestine and the Queer International and Gentrification of the Mind, both of which came out in 2012. That first book is a reflection of Schulman’s own experience of coming to terms with Israeli propaganda and the ways it has warped Judaism towards supremacist thinking, documenting a cultural envoy that Schulman led to meet with queer Palestinian organizers in 2011. Now, appearing in the maelstrom of this genocidal moment, with events plucked fresh from solidarity encampments across North America and from intimate personal conversations she’s had in the wake of October 7, Schulman writes with fresh urgency, asking us all to see how precarious, and precious, these acts of solidarity truly are.
In the book’s introduction Schulman writes that “Solidarity is the action behind the revelation that each of us, individually, are not the only people with dreams.” Prodding her readers to see other people’s needs as real has long been one of Schulman’s most urgent demands, particularly those whose material privileges may otherwise blind them to those with less. A simple ability to even care about someone else’s hardship, and the reality that so many people in the United States are suffering, is an inescapable conflict in our country, and one that recurs with sickening frequency. The question of who chooses to care, and how they go about fighting for others who may have much less animates The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity. By challenging the more longstanding notion of solidarity within the labor movement, where workers may see themselves as largely moving in tandem with others in basically the same place as themselves, Schulman reminds us that this is a moment for sticking our necks out for those with even less to go on. She adds: “Part of the fantasy of being in solidarity is a magical combination of pure motive, clean action, and predictably victorious outcome. Part of the fantasy is that we will do everything right and give up nothing and the afflicted will love us, as we will love each other and ourselves.”
True solidarity is a messy business. It often entails embarrassment, shame, and the realization that your perspective is limited, coming to terms with those gaps on the fly without those ugly feelings being pushed back onto the person who helped you feel them in the first place.
“Being comfortable cannot be the determining factor in my actions,” Schulman wrote back in Gentrification of the Mind, and it’s really that simple: in order to grow, we must recognize our own shortfalls, sit quietly with the challenges laid at our feet by others who demand we become more curious and resilient, and take our own actions, without expectation of praise by those whose sole focus may lie in whether they’ll survive the day or not.
These insights have been central to my own personal and political development since 2017, when I graduated college and first read Schulman’s work. Her book Conflict is Not Abuse helped me make sense of the injustice of being ostracized from my college friend group, without recourse to make amends; it also prodded me into doing conflict mediation organizing within the Chicago DSA chapter, aware that sometimes people working together to remake the world won’t always get along. Across these works, and especially upon the 2021 release of Let the Record Show, Schulman’s brilliant oral history of ACT UP New York, of which she was a member, I’ve learned so much about what effective political action might look like, how we move forward even when total agreement isn’t possible.
ACT UP is one of Schulman’s key reference points, as a model of an organization with significant white, male leadership that nonetheless made major gains for women and people of color. The group, especially as elaborated in Let the Record Show, is a rare but tangible example of how we might work across the complicated lines of power and identity that often trip up good organizing.
“Trying to make people all agree on approaching the problem the same way is not effective, and this is because people are different and therefore can only be where they are at,” Schulman writes. This insight did not come easily, as she adds. “It took me decades of therapy to accept this.”
For the rest of us, there’s simply no time to move without that same understanding, to find ways of building power for those most imperiled, even when we struggle to agree on precisely how to get there.
Schulman draws upon historic examples of white artists like Alice Neel, Jean Genet, and Carson McCullers as models of imperfect actors who nonetheless sought to deepen their understanding of those different from them. For Neel it was her working-class neighbors and painting subjects; for Genet, the Palestinians he befriended in numerous visits to the country; and McCullers, her deep empathy for Black characters that eventually led Richard Wright to say that she “[rose] above the pressures of her environment and embraced white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness.”
Schulman’s emphasis on these figures grounds us in reminders that their actions often came at great personal expense, yet enriched the world with their daring.
But if there’s some truth to the fact that white people have perhaps the greatest need to use their privileges to make change for those whose lives are on the line, such an approach can inadvertently recenter these white figures and their bravery, making heroes of them when that daring is perhaps better observed elsewhere, especially amongst, for example, Palestinians themselves. Ultimately, Schulman is writing to an American audience who must be encouraged to take these kinds of actions for those they may never meet, and so reminders of those taking similar steps before can be helpful. But the model she set forth in Let The Record Show, in which a much broader tapestry of ordinary people rose to meet the moment, is perhaps a better example for how we must see ourselves right now: perfectly normal people, simply standing up against what we know to be wrong.
Schulman’s latest book concludes with the chapter When Solidarity Fails, reprinting in full a previous talk that she co-hosted with trans historian Morgan M. Page about Bryn Kelly, a trans writer who took her own life in 2016. Schulman was close with Kelly, and her suicide has stuck with her in the near-decade since, a sad precedent for our own moment of sharply increased trans suicidality. Describing her death as a failure of solidarity reflects not merely on the horrible conditions that placed Kelly, an HIV-positive, impoverished trans woman, in great peril. It’s a reminder that we first practice solidarity in our closest relationships, showing up for one another whenever we can in these impossible times, keeping one another alive when nobody else will.
I am fortunate to follow in Kelly’s footsteps as one of the many trans women that Schulman has mentored. A cold email in 2021, sent only after I’d felt I’d done enough writing and organizing to carry on credibly with my favorite writer, led to us going for a walk and starting a relationship, one that’s led me to enrolling in an MFA program with Sarah at Northwestern last fall. To read The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity in a long line of Sarah’s other books is a gift in itself, a reminder that writers are asked to think in public, that our ideas percolate and recombine over time. To be reminded that we can be wrong and change perspective, something captured in Sarah’s writing about Israel, is especially meaningful now: there is no time like the present to recast one’s thoughts, to stare at grim reality with fresh eyes, and to do our best with whatever we have available to us to demand something different. With a growing audience that finally caught on after Let The Record Show, Sarah’s voice has never been more needed. Those who long for a reprieve from this cruel world are being told from the highest levels that our agency is meaningless, that we may as well shrivel away, censor ourselves, go into hiding until we are found. We’ve done enough witnessing to know that nothing can stay the same. Now the harder task of building the world we need to survive.
Annie Howard is an MFA student in creative nonfiction at Northwestern, currently working on her first book The City Made Me Trans.
It's the Super Bowl tomorrow so I thought we could read this piece from last year about watching the big game which I will probably also do again and I'm sorry about that.
Luke O’Neil
I don't know how to live
We watched every snap of the game. Both of us. Me and you. Everyone else did too. The commercials for Jesus from an evil church and the commercials for an ongoing massacre by an evil country. We watched the whole thing which I guess was itself a commercial for the entire concept of this evil country of our own. I was going to say it is our essence distilled but that implies something being made small and more potent which is the opposite of the Super Bowl and America neither of which can be diminished but instead can only expand.
Devour.
I don't know.
Something so garish defies metaphor. Something so large defies metaphor.
If a towering beast appeared on the horizon laying waste to everything in its path right now you wouldn't think to describe it as being like something else you would simply and dumbly perceive its horrible mass.
Unless that exact thing happened in a foreign movie in which case it would typically be a metaphor for America.
Hold on someone is at the door.
It was some guys delivering our new mattress. I asked them if they would help me carry it up the stairs and they said no. So now I have that burden.
There were pummeling civilians in a densely packed area of Gaza that people had previously been told to go to for safety. You could tell it was a bad one this time because even CNN was assigning agency to Israel in their reporting.
I had a brief notion that this tension I was feeling was something remarkable but it wasn't at all. It was just how every day is anyway for those of us lucky enough to live how we do.
A matter of course.
I scrolled by an image of a little baby Palestinian boy whose head looked like a smashed jar of tomato sauce and had to immediately avert my gaze. I thought that this has to happen for some reason. Every day this has to happen.
Even though I only half saw him I can still see him now like a bright red migraine aura when I close my eyes.
Then a picture of me and you came up in my phone memories from the Super Bowl years ago in Houston. The greatest comeback in history.
Look how happy we were. Like nothing else mattered.
I need to be distracted again like that. I need to be distracted from this. They should have the Super Bowl again tonight.
I’m just thinking out loud here.
Tomorrow too. Make the entire year out of Super Bowls. An entire country of it. Spreading and swelling. One game after the next. Script it like that. So that our easy lives may never be interrupted by new word from the world.
I don't think I know how to live correctly. If there is a correct way.
What does a person do?
The next morning it was a sunny February Monday in Massachusetts. I should have been hungover if I could still get hangovers. They were saying that we were supposed to be buried under a surprise foot of snow tomorrow. It was probably going to be a day off for the kids.
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