Why would I ever want to be one of them

"Manzanar Split Tree"by thereshegoesagain is licensed under CC BY 2.0

In anthropology, they teach you to recognize patterns of human behavior. Many like to believe that it’s the science of human beings. That with its tools, we can make sense of humans. All I found was that we are animals doing performance art. 

It’s also the science that helped Armchair Victorians answer the question: brown people, why? I didn’t see this you know, as a child. I didn’t see that anthropology was my way of chopping myself into pieces and turning the white piece to the brown piece to ask the same question. 

Why?

Last year around this time, I was on a road trip. It was eye-opening in many ways. We visited ghost towns, old mining towns that had either run dry or were barely hanging on. Places ravaged and plundered by the reckless pursuit of natural resources. I never really processed that people still lived in these places and willingly called them ghost towns. Descendants of settlers, miners, or people trying to buy cheap property to cash in on tourists like us. Like me. 

I don’t always feel brown, you see. Most of the time, I don’t even really allow myself to think about my own brownness. It’s never really been up to me. In the ghost towns of Nevada, I was brown. The stares told me so. 

But the stares weren’t all meant for me. I was traveling with two older women, people who I considered new friends at the time. One, a tall gravely-voiced woman who gave no shits. White. The other was a smaller, wiser woman who also gave no shits, in her way. Black. Police cars drove by repeatedly. Groups of children came out to wave…and stare. There was ‘no room’ in the fancier hotel. I felt the stares on my back constantly. It made me furious.

If you had asked me at the time why I was so angry, I wouldn’t have been able to say. It’s not as if I haven’t felt that gaze before. Remember: I don’t allow myself to think about my brownness. Later, speaking with the smaller friend, the one who bore that gaze every goddamned day of her life, she told me something I hadn’t considered: they probably thought I was her mixed-race kid.

I am a mixed kid, of a different mix. It’s been my bane and my greatest strength. In those towns, some still thought it was a crime[1].

On our way back from Nevada, we stopped at Manzanar[2]. This was the site of an American concentration camp during World War II, two hours from where I grew up. I can’t really explain to you what I felt there, but the suffering will poison that ground forever. You can see it in the trees.

"Orchard"by teofilo is licensed under CC BY 2.0

The taller one kept talking about how if we’re not careful, this country would put people in places like that again. I replied; this country has never stopped doing that[3].

I am back in that town that I grew up in, two hours from Manzanar. These days, Adelanto is only an hour away. Make no mistake, it’s a camp like any of the others. An ICE Processing Center they like to say. But I know what that means. Somewhere in your bones, you know it too. 

Abolish ICE rally outside of Adelanto

Why have I not allowed myself to think of myself as brown? Because somewhere in my bones, I know what happens to brown people. The question that haunts me now is why would I ever want to be one of them? The ones who decide who’s white, brown or otherwise. The ones with privilege. With power. With the perceived superiority over others by virtue of crushing them beneath their boots. 

I think I also tried to be an anthropologist to ask: Why do you do this to us? To my father? His people? My friend’s people? My neighbor’s people? 

I can finally answer that question without anthropology. Because you forgot you are one of us. There’s more genetic variation in every other creature on this earth than there is between human beings. 

We were all brown, once.

“I’m not interested in pursuing a society that uses analysis, research, and experimentation to concretize their vision of cruel destinies for those who are not bastards of the Pilgrims; a society with arrogance rising, moon in oppression, and sun in destruction.”

– Barbara Cameron “Gee, You Don’t Seem Like an Indian…” from This Bridge Called My Back

 [1]More on Miscegenation laws in the US https://www.thoughtco.com/interracial-marriage-laws-721611

[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/07/us/manzanar-japanese-americans-internment-camp.html

[3]More on the relocation of Native Americans: https://www.thoughtco.com/the-trail-of-tears-1773597; On the prison industrial complex https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/us/new-jim-crow-book-ban-prison.html; On profiling and surveillance of Muslims https://ccrjustice.org/home/what-we-do/issues/muslim-profiling

The Era of the Witch

I could not quite say what it was about 2017 that brought witches to mind. Pop culture references might have triggered it (looking at you Samantha Bee and Broad City). There was also that horror/not horror/scarily accurate movie The Witch.

Now, now, hold it right there. Yes, you, panicking about another damn feminist polemic. While I wear the feminist badge proudly, this is not a feminist piece. It might ring more true for those on the feminine spectrum, yes. Still, I would suggest the amount of fear you feel reading these opening paragraphs is about how much you need to read them. It will go a long way to help us both understand the rage of many of the people in our lives. Perhaps it will even explain your own rage. All I know is that something must change about the way we use the word ‘witch’.

I take it back; perhaps this all started with a book I read. Most things do. It was Witches, Sluts, Feminists by Kristen J. Sollee. While it focused on the history of witchcraft in Europe and North America, Sollee’s main argument was that ‘slut’ is the new ‘witch’. There was always something sexually charged about calling a woman a ‘witch’, a threat to wholesome society. These days, ‘slut’ takes on that particular role. Both words have been used to police the out-spoken, the empowered and the sex-positive. Many have swung from a rope or have burned at a stake for little less than being different over the centuries. It was uplifting to read the stories of folks reclaiming ‘witch’ and ‘slut’ as their own.

Reading Sollee’s book resonated with me as I spent time with my own family in the Old Country. I was in that precarious space of unmarried and 30. So my family talked to me and about me differently. I am a mixed kid who has had the privilege of travel so I know that an unmarried woman above a certain age is always viewed as some kind of threat. As I adjusted to this new way of being seen, I started to notice a theme in the stories about my non-male relatives. I had always accepted as fact that grandma was ‘mean’ and grandpa was ‘gentle’. My father’s family is a matriarchy since the person with the highest authority is a nun. But only technically, since a nun sacrifices gender and sex for eternal service to the Big G in the Sky. My family accepts the nun as powerful because she is not a woman anymore. Grandma, well, she was mean. The most I could learn about Grandma was that she was into ‘spiritism’. This immediately made me interested. I found instead that my family wanted me to understand that ‘mean’ women mess with the spirits, and vice versa. Beyond that, mouths clamped shut.

Allow me to keep track of the words: Witch. Slut. Spiritist.

To my family’s dismay, I started to take city buses. I cannot resist public transportation, no matter how dangerous. Who does not want to go upwards of 20 miles for cents on the dollar? It also gave me time with another book on this journey: Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution by Mona Eltahawy. Eltahawy is a polarizing figure in the Middle East. Since her incendiary article in Foreign Policy, critics have called her many things. Many of the critiques of her article are fair. Misogyny is not inherent in Islam, a point she is careful to make in Headscarves and Hymens. So let me be clear here as well: no one’s country or religion makes them a terrible human being. If someone does not treat people well, it is likely due to a history of abuse, ignorance or patriarchy.

Eltahawy takes issue with certain interpretations of Islamic law and those clerics who use it to oppress others. She has never stopped being a Muslim woman and continues to practice her faith while still identifying as a feminist. She was all anyone could talk about for a solid part of 2012. She sparked an important conversation, nonetheless. Respect must be shown to the ‘mad’ woman who calls out injustice, even if she is on her own. After all, don’t we all go a bit mad when we aren’t listened to?

Witch. Slut. Spiritist. Mad.

On those brand new buses into the city, I cried reading Eltahawy’s words. She has always been unafraid to call the discriminatory personal status laws in the Middle East and North Africa hatred. These are laws that cover family issues such as marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance. What concerns Eltahawy and many other human rights critics is that these laws are biased against women, queer folx and free speech. They vary between region, country and cleric. In severe cases, women are required to marry their rapists. Generally, they are wards of their fathers or husbands. Sex outside of marriage is illegal across the region, particularly if it is queer. Consequences for free speech and political dissent have, of course, grown stronger since 2011.

Do not be mistaken, I was not crying because I was reading about gender discrimination on a bus in the Sahara. And believe me, there are an overwhelming number of incidents of sexual harassment on buses and train cars like it. I cried because I had lived that discrimination, even as a first-generation American. Hate may be legal in the cities of North Africa but it lived in the White Baptist halls of the schools I went to in the United States of America. I cried from bearing the weight of that hateful gaze no matter where I was.

Since I have been back in these United States, it has become harder and harder to deny how heavy that weight is. The Supreme Court confirmation hearings, for example, have been pure spectacle. Citizens have a right to judge all public servants based on their treatment of those more vulnerable than they are. We rarely do that, though. Private conversations in kitchens and coffee shops do not count. I mean actually holding our representatives, our colleagues, our bosses, our friends to account for how they treat others. Yes, #MeToo and all that but, have you noticed how hard it is to make the accused face actual consequences?

It is difficult to make someone face their mistakes. The more public, the more like a circus it becomes. I will be a tad bit more US-centric here: it has been difficult to charge anyone in the Trump administration with anything. By anything, I mean the full spectrum of tax evasion to rape. I mention this because of how many times I have heard someone in that circus say the word ‘witch-hunt’. I had trouble understanding who exactly the witches were: were they the ones who accuse or were they the ones being accused? It was a special kind of twisted to hear wealthy, prominent white men compare their public scrutiny to a hate crime. That is what witch-hunts are folks:hate crimes. Guess what? The numbers do not support the idea that prominent white men are being hunted.

This graph was originally printed in The Economist but don’t let the article fool you. Take a look at how hate crime rates have grown since 2015.

I am left with the same question: who were the witches? The numbers in the graph above would suggest they weren’t white men in 2015, especially in the United States.

A portion of the infographic published by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR).

If we take a more global look, the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights shows that the most hunted were not women in 2016. Many identified as women, many did not, most were queer, and a great deal were brown or black. Humanity has so much fear and hate for more than just women who are different. What was it exactly that they had for us to be afraid of?

It is strange, but the word that comes to mind is power. Humans are tribal and more often than not, we kill or maim what we are afraid of. Sometimes, for brief beautiful moments in time, we rally together and rage against hate crimes and turn the world upside down. Sometimes, we stop hunting witches and we become them.

I would like to add another word to that list I was keeping track of: Witch. Slut. Spiritist. Mad. Revolutionary. That is what I ask those of you who feel rage and dismay to become. If you are feared for being different, for simply being what you know in your soul you are, you are a witch. You are a revolutionary. You have the power to protect one another. You have the power to create community. You have the power to reject courts and systems that do not serve you. You and I are the ones who grant them authority. Let us not do that anymore, shall we? Our time will be much better spent creating.

Resourceful

I appreciated many things about Egyptian mythology. What I loved most was that the Earth wasn’t a woman. No need to cringe over the treatment of the great mother, raping her of resources, or the fracking of her crust. Geb, Father Earth, completed the cosmos where he met the sky.

To be clear, I appreciate the beauty of a benevolent Earth mother, a resplendent Gaia in pagan Spring. Humanity tends to feminize all things with a womb and use it without regard for consequences. The problem here is not metaphor, it’s that what we own, use and inhabit is somehow automatically feminine. What we use or own is often, also, abused.

Once land and people started to hold monetary value they often became resources. Wealth, class and race divided people into workforce and landowners. In The Ascent of Woman Dr. Amanda Foreman notes the Code of Hammurabi was the first time that humanity defined women's limitations. Empires and households traded women for being able to produce more human capital. The only advantage to being a wealthy womb was a life of leisure as you despaired over the production of a male heir. The poor wombs not only had to produce enough humans to work the land, but also labor of their own to worry over. In either case, society tied women’s value to domesticity, birth or sex.

There’s a twisted symmetry to it. Outside of their ability to produce, resources have little value. Consequences to the resources themselves are only considered when they affect others. Consider how de/regulation follows a high death toll or the halt of a production line. It matters little if resources are sickly, as long as they can still make more. Endanger that and owners will make changes. Human greed or neglect is rarely to blame for dwindling resources. In fact, scarcity often leads to a greater control over any given resource. If there is only so much crude oil left, might as well make the most profit from what remains. It’s so much more valuable when it’s rare, after all.

A resource doesn’t have the ability to offer consent. Women themselves choosing when not to give birth is a political hotbed in every country. Women become lobbyists, activists or politicians and raise their voices. Yet congresses and parliaments ignore them as if they had no voice. Women and the Earth are useful in their bounty and wasteful unless they produce value.

It’s disturbing how humanity resorts to exploitation, and not only of the women of the Earth. All is insubstantial to the power of profit and woe to those who are essentially, valuable. Money can raise lobbies, think tanks, campaigns, and court rulings to protect profit. It is lawful for the Earth, women, LGBTIQ persons, people of color, the poor, and others to be resources. Global climate, economic and human rights agreements are attempts to curb centuries of abuse. A global wealthy white minority continues to reinforce and support these practices.

Harassment is on the international stage these days. It’s the everyday act of exerting power over someone who is vulnerable. They are not always women, but it is the women that humanity somehow finds the most difficult to believe. There are many countries where a woman's word is suspect, but the idea alone is devastating. How often is one accusation of harassment or rape enough? How many wealthy celebrities did it take to take down a Weinstein? Wealth, once again, does not protect those who have wombs. It was Alianza Nacional de Campesinas who sounded the weariest support. Farmworkers are no stranger to exploitation and harassment:

“We do not work under bright stage lights or on the big screen. We work in the shadows of society in isolated fields and packinghouses that are out of sight and out of mind for most people in this country. Your job feeds souls, fills hearts and spreads joy. Our job nourishes the nation with the fruits, vegetables and other crops that we plant, pick and pack.

The kind of thinking that leads to exploitation has consequences. Where and to whom we assign profit and value is racist and gendered. Worst of all, those who suffer from scarcity and abuse often disappear. Disaster favors the prepared and very few of us have the wealth or the insurance to recover from it. We dismiss those we lose to starvation and death in Appalachia, Sudan or Yemen. It’s always the strong that survive, isn’t it?

Reckless development as misogyny is more pernicious. The Earth is lying there, daring to be plentiful and lush. Drill baby, drill. Rape analogies for the Earth should make corporate development horrifying, but they don't. Horrifying because rape is horrifying. Horrifying because it drives people from their homes. Horrifying because it floods land and sea in toxic crude oil. Horrifying because it affects us all, gendered or not.

The earth is a celestial body. It possesses no gender, has no need to perform a societal role. It simply is. Humans still can’t seem to move beyond societal roles even if they shift over time. It has not benefitted more than half of humanity to be only as valuable as what they produce between their legs. It has not benefitted the earth to be only as valuable as its ability to sustain humanity. Identity and how we treat one another should no longer depend on biology or gender. There are ancient, systemic problems with how we value gender and production. We cannot solve equality or poverty overnight. So, I have a simple request to start the process: reconsider how you decide what or who is valuable. We can’t ask the earth how it would prefer we see it, but we can certainly ask one another.