No Flowers for Susan

Monday, November 9, 2020

7:43 PM

w a y   t o o   n a r r o w

It's two days since we got news that the most flagrant fascist in the White House of all time did in fact NOT win the country's official electoral count. LUCKY IS PROBABLY THE RIGHT WORD FOR THIS OUTCOME BECAUSE DEMOCRACY ONE BY WAY TOO NARROW A MARGIN.  

Many folks are still in celebration mode here and about on the interwebs, so far as I can tell, and like any good drunk, or a stoner using an Indica, you better believe peeps are getting sentimental. Like overly so.  Like, showing themselves to have a lot of naïve ideas about what it means to live in a country the size of Russia that nearly became Russia kind-of-naivety.  And in the midst of this sloshy return from staring death in the face, rightfully so, a lot of people are looking for who we have to thank for delivering this however temporary victory over authoritarianism.  

Spoilers, there are a lot of folks to thank.  And while you're thinking about it and making a list, just be sure to put Black women up there around the top of your list.  

Check in:  Does it feel weird saying it was "Black" women who lended such massive support in this election, when clearly so many women showed up at the polls?  Well then I'd say You better not read the rest of this without a strong drink, sister.

* * * * *

n o   g a r d e n   a n g e l

So apparently there's a tradition for women to put flowers at Susan B Anthony's grave after an election.  And it seems that in this haze of gratitude and pumpkin spiced reprieval from the very gates of Hell itself, lots of folks are tending to their much celebrated feminist legend with sprigs of victory ivy and Giant-brand yellow mums. Isn't that sweet?

But let us not forget that Susan B Anthony was no garden angel. Besides her heroic stance against the patriarchy, she was also a massive prig in the face of a unified feminist front that could have rejected the prevailing racism at the time, her actions directly speaking to preventing Black women from having the vote.  Anthony publicly rejected the plight of Black women at the time, despite their constant support of her plight.  

I am a righteous bitch today, and I have no flowers for Susan.  

Instead, today I have a public denouncement that has been a century and a half in the making.

* * * * *

o f f i c i a l   p u b l i c   

d e n o u n c e m e n t 

Here is what I need to say about this white woman, and I need to proclaim it officially:

Susan B Anthony divisively used Black Women as a step stool on which she and her party stood claiming superiority.  She was such a piece of shit in this arena, (I'd say human rights is a pretty BIG arena) that she used her party's whiteness as evidence of greater worth. She participated in claiming that white women such as herself had greater intelligence and opinions than the Black woman, or even say, Asian immigrants (this is actually from the discourse at the time).  (BTW did you know I'm Asian?)  (Check my eyes) She helped build a movement by justifying white women's worth OVER Black women, or any other women for that matter, in the fight for suffrage.

She was known for having said, "I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman.”

Interestingly, she was also my aunt.  

* * * * *

u n p a i d   d e b t s 

Check in:  Did you just think that I can't possibly be related to Susan B Anthony because I'm clearly brown and that doesn't make any sense?  Silly billy. I'm not gonna explain it but if it's still not making sense I'd check the tightness setting on your baseball cap, it might be set on a slightly too small setting.

Now, if you also believe in generational trauma, you'll understand when I say that I can not simply let that debt remain unpaid.  I can't sit by and watch women like Breonna Taylor be killed by a system of rule and unjust power that my family reinforced.  By a system that my tax dollars pay for.  By a government that I complain and collaborate with (when the Kremlin isn't involved, that is.)  If you're thinking, I'm taking this too seriously, How complicit do you think I need to be in order to justifiably take this seriously?  A little more?  A lot more? 

I am not my aunt.  And I believe that in order to change the great injustices done to the Black community in this country, it's important to claim responsibility for the wrongs done by our blood. This is not finance.  The debt does not disappear from this earth.  Wrongs are not righted when the unjust die.  Heaven does not make your time sheet suddenly say you showed up to work for all forty hours, friend.  

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h a t e   i n   t h e   w a t e r

We gotta take our cue from the earth here.  Trees, right after being demolished, do not grow back immediately. There must be space for healing.  The earth, like humans in trauma, needs time to metabolize what was and give time for new seeds to sprout.  And abuse of the land must stop for any recovery to occur.

But the abuse of Black folks has not stopped, friends.  It has persistent and consistent.  

And let's be clear: the only way to stop something with this many years of momentum and destruction is to do so forcefully and with great intention.

The fuck you say about this shit wearing out over the generations, it is patently false.  Hate doesn't have to be overt to be potent.  It can slip into your water and go unnoticed for many many years.

I think that if nothing else, our country at large learned from this recent election that hate did in fact live in the water and go unnoticed by white folks for a lot of years.  

* * * * *

a   c o s m i c   d e b t

Susan was wrong.  She upheld racism in the midst of her own struggle for freedom.  She threw women with whom she confided under the proverbial bus to achieve her goals.  It's shameful, and as prominent a figure she is in modern history books, it's disgusting to me that more texts do not call her out for it.

But maybe there is accountability in the long lens, looking at this person as one part of a story through history.

Because, all these generations later, here we are in the 20th century now, and that Opportunist, racist white woman unwittingly had a brown Asian (distant) niece, who after a lot of confusing years and the turning of the millennium, is only now publicly denouncing her aunt's unforgivable abandonment of Black women, and that is happening on the calendar edge of a possible coup of the United States of America.

Talk about a cosmic debt taking a while to come back around.  

If this were a comet, the orbit would be stupidly wide and wonky, and it would be a really annoying comet that folks don't necessarily believe in and when it does show up no one is looking at the skies and all we hear from astronomers is, "Shit, I think we missed it."

* * * * *

a t   t h e   v e r y   l e a s t

At least in long term consideration of my family, this violence against Black folks is going to stop with me.  And in my record-scratching fury, I have made several vows with myself to ensure that my integrity now does not falter later.

I will not allow the enigma of white superiority to lurk in the shadows of my own white-passing children. 

As an Asian woman, I will not allow the ambiguity of passing in white culture under the model minority banner, gaining access to very white spaces where Black voices are not honored, by pretending their absence does not matter.  I have come to think of it as a set of scales, weighing the equality created by my ancestors all the way up to me. What had bloodline given to equality?  How is my lineage affecting this earth? Are we healing or are we hurting?

I have made decisions about my life's work based on my own momentary whims, but now, I'm thinking for the long term of my family, and of who will come after me.  As a result, I have vowed that I will not work in a field of practice that does not make space on purpose for my Black siblings; Black voices matter.  At the VERY LEAST, I can insist that Black voices be present in any room where I exist.  I am clear that nothing useful is won without them, ever.

No one is free if Black folks are not free.  No one.  In the US, anti Native Americanness and Anti blackness is such that all our mixed and diverse identities are piled on top of them. US identity is built on the murder and enslavement of these peoples. Anyone telling you different, including Susan B Anthony, is selling you something that costs someone else a lot more.

* * * * *

c o n s i d e r   u s   a   
s w i n g   s t a t e ,   b i t c h

As a nation, even in the wake of an historically diverse election ousting an out-right fascist, we are not free with this debt in our generational identity. 

Susan can fuck right off. 

I'm in this fight too and I am clear about where I stand. CONSIDER US A SWING STATE, BITCH.

The abuse of Black folks for the gain of white ones ends with me in my family.

And I won't let us swing back.

* * * * *

I encourage you to calculate your debt at this historic moment. To help make things right, in the long term especially, what do you need to acknowledge, and where do you need to put your weight to make things right?

Tara-In-Whiterland