I long for a world where my actions weren’t gendered

Michael Harriot tweeted a thread. Here’s part of it.

EVER SINCE black people got the right to vote, the same party has been in control of the South. It’s not Democrat OR Republican. It’s the Lily white faction. Whichever party controls the Lily white faction controls conservative politics. It’s why Nixon’s Southern Strategy worked. It’s why Reagan’s first major speech as a candidate was at the site where Klansmen murdered civil rights workers. And for years, EVERY successful Republican stoked this faction. Remember when Bush’s campaign said John McCain had a Black baby? Lily whites. ... But White voters in the South don’t love the GOP. They love TRUMP. They generally despise politicians. As you can see?, they don’t care about abortion, fiscal conservatism or religion. But they will NEVER vote for a Democrat. They might like the policies but they can’t do it. Their grandparents were Democrats, so it’s not party allegiance. Their parents voted for people like Reagan & Bush, so it’s not the establishment. But the churches, schools and entire society have cemented their support for the Lily white faction.

Harriot ended by saying don’t ask black people to fix it because if they did the lily whites will rise again. A few months ago my friend and debate partner tried to convince me that Republicans, as despicable as they are, weren’t racist. Here’s another way to respond to him: They are fine with using racism to gain power and racists like what they do to the point of voting for a candidate based solely on their willingness to support racism. A few days ago I had written that voting rights activists were upset with Biden for not putting his bully pulpit to use for voting rights, saying instead that the problem will be solved by voter turnout. But, turnout alone can’t overcome new voter suppression laws or finely carved gerrymandering. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos added one more reason: In Georgia, where new Senator Raphael Warnock is up for reelection in 2022, the legislature has already passed laws to allow them to overturn elections they don’t like. They’re already working to take over the elections board in Fulton County, the county with the most Democrats. High turnout in voting cannot overcome election theft (which is quite different from voter fraud, which is quite rare). Last Sunday’s Detroit Free Press included an opinion piece by Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald. Pitts, who is black, has written about racism for about 40 years. This particular column was about Critical Race Theory and its sudden appearance as the imminent cause of the downfall of America. Yeah, wrote Pitts, just like the hyperventilation over War on Christmas, sharia law, and gay wedding cakes. Pitts concluded:

Today, it’s critical race theory. Tomorrow — mark my words — it will be something else, some other pithy term to serve as a repository of all that the white right fears. There are many things for which they should be afraid — life, health, future. But sadly, they fear nothing quite so much as the loss of whiteness and its privileges. As I said, I know this terrain well. Yet I keep hoping it will surprise me someday.

The phrase that prompted me to write about it is, “they fear nothing quite so much as the loss of whiteness and its privileges.” I’ve been saying this for a while now. They’re afraid that their position at the top of the social hierarchy might be in jeopardy. Testimony before the House January 6th Commission has begun. Today they featured four officers from the Capitol (or maybe DC) Police. Leah McElrath tweeted short clips of the testimony with her commentary:

See the expression on Officer Michael Fanone’s face and the direction his eyes are pointing and the look within them in this clip? This is what it looks like when someone is reliving a trauma during a retelling. I’ve born witness to this in my work as a trauma therapist. These officers are not just testifying at the #January6thCommission hearing. They are RELIVING the trauma they experienced. For us. For our country. For our democracy. Because they know the danger we are facing. They have lived it. ... Importantly, notice how often the officers refer to the impact on them of their sense of BETRAYAL—both on the day of the insurrection and in the Republican response afterward. Violence experienced in a context of betrayal can be far more traumatizing than otherwise.

Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos from a couple weeks ago quoted Josh Marshall of TPM:

I’ve seen numerous journalists and commentators refer to this as Trump’s ‘revisionist history’ of the events of January 6th. That’s the wrong way to look at this. No one, especially Trump’s target audiences, forgets the pictures of Capitol Police officers being struck with flag poles and dragged into the crowd for beatings or insurrectionists marauding through the halls of Congress. The point of his over-the-top claims isn’t to litigate the particulars of any specific encounter. Their very absurdity is less an effort to deceive as a demonstration of power. They are meant to make the case that the whole event was justified, righteous and right.

From another roundup a couple days before that, Dworkin quoted Katie Sherrod:

If black and brown children are old enough to experience racism, white children are old enough to learn about it.

Then a quote from Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt of The Atlantic:

When contemporary democracies die, they usually do so via constitutional hardball. Democracy’s primary assailants today are not generals or armed revolutionaries, but rather politicians—Hugo Chávez, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—who eviscerate democracy’s substance behind a carefully crafted veneer of legality and constitutionality. This is precisely what could happen in the next U.S. presidential race. Elections require forbearance. For elections to be democratic, all adult citizens must be equally able to cast a ballot and have that vote count. Using the letter of the law to violate the spirit of this principle is strikingly easy. Election officials can legally throw out large numbers of ballots on the basis of the most minor technicalities (e.g., the oval on the ballot is not entirely penciled in, or the mail-in ballot form contains a typo or spelling mistake). Large-scale ballot disqualification accords with the letter of the law, but it is inherently antidemocratic, for it denies suffrage to many voters.

Clio2 wrote for the Readers and Book Lovers group of the Kos community about being nonbinary.

“Nonbinary” can signify a sense of gender that is someplace in-between, a bit of both, neither, varying, nonexistent, outside the system altogether, contradictory, evolving, or quite removed from the usual way we think about gender.

The discussion worked through four anthologies for a total of nearly 100 essays written by nonbinary people that describe what such a life is like. The first time a person deals with being nonbinary is almost always over clothes. In our society, as in many, clothes are highly gendered. So this is the place where a person’s sense of self smacks against societal expectations. Clio2 also discussed feelings. We’re told feelings aren’t facts, but strong feelings are a fact that indicates something is going on. There is gender dysphoria, when there is a conflict between gender expectation and personal gender understanding. Sometimes that includes a mismatch between gender and anatomy (which we usually call transgender). There is also gender euphoria, the joy felt when a sense of gender is affirmed. There is a wide spectrum of what nonbinary people call themselves – metagender, genderfluid, and many more. In America we’ve somewhat accepted “they” as the pronoun for nonbinary, though many others are considered, such as “xe.” One of the quotes from an anthology:

I long for a world where my actions weren’t gendered and I could just interact as a human, where people, trans and cisgender alike, didn’t have to carry around the constant pressure of gender roles thrust upon them.

That quote is from Haven Wilvich, from page 61 of Nonbinary Memoirs of Gender and Identity, edited by Micah Rajunov and Scott Duane.