On Tuesday, November 8, 2016, a sizeable minority of the U.S. electorate chose to send billionaire Donald Trump, an avowed sexist and an unrepentant racist, who has spent nearly forty years antagonizing vulnerable people, to the White House. Spewing hatred at women, people of color, immigrants, Muslims, and those with disabilities is Trump’s most consistent, and well-documented form of public engagement. Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women because, as he quipped, his celebrity made it easy for him to do so. We can only assume that the hostile climate and anxiety about what is to come were contributing factors. The political shift we are witnessing, including the appointment of open bigots to the president-elect’s cabinet, reaffirms the structural disposability and systemic disregard for every person who is not white, male, straight, cisgender, able-bodied, and middle or upper class.
As a community of feminist scholars, activists and artists, we affirm that the time to act is now. We cannot endure four years of a Trump presidency without a plan. We must protect reproductive justice, fight for Black lives, defend the rights of LGBTQIA people, disrupt the displacement of indigenous people and the stealing of their resources, advocate and provide safe havens for the undocumented, stridently reject Islamophobia, and oppose the acceleration of neoliberal policies that divert resources to the top 1% and abandon those at the bottom of the economic hierarchy. We must also denounce militarization at home and abroad, and climate change denial that threatens to destroy the entire planet.
We must also reject calls to compromise, to understand, or to collaborate. We cannot and will not comply. Our number one priority is to resist. We must resist the instantiation of autocracy. We must resist this perversion of democracy. We must refuse spin and challenge any narratives that seek to call this moment “democracy at work.” This is not democracy; this is the rise of a 21st century U.S. version of fascism. We must name it, so we can both confront and defeat it.
The most vulnerable, both here and abroad, cannot afford for us to equivocate or remain silent. The threats posed by settler colonialism and empire around the globe have never been more real, nor has our resolve to oppose these injustices ever been stronger. Concretely, within the U.S., we oppose the building of a wall along the U.S. – Mexico border, and the establishment of a registry for Muslim residents.
We owe this moment and the communities we fight for our very best thinking, teaching, and organizing. We must find creative solutions to address the immediate needs of those who will be acutely affected within the first 100 days of Trump’s presidency. We must push ourselves into new, and more precise and radical analytical frameworks that can help us to articulate the stakes of this moment.
The most important thing we can do in this moment is to make an unqualified commitment to those on the margins through our actions, insist that the media be allowed to do its job; and protect the right to protest and dissent. We recognize clearly that our silence will not protect us. Silence, in the aftermath of 11/8 is not merely a lack of words; it is a profound inertia of liberatory thought and praxis. So - what are we waiting for? We are who we are waiting for. We pledge to stand and fight, with fierce resolve, for the values and principles we believe in and the people we love.
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Thanks for writing and circulating and putting yourselves on the line as leaders in the most important battle we face right now.
“We owe this moment and the communities we fight for our very best thinking, teaching, and organizing. We must find creative solutions….”
Agreed.
Trump is disgusting and dangerous and offensive.
Agreed.
We need to organize to oppose any Trump administration efforts to create a Muslim registry, deny climate change, deport 11 million, and more.
It is difficult to understand how so many fellow Americans could overlook the fact that Trump is disgusting, dangerous and offensive and that he was promising policies designed to hurt our most vulnerable and that he consistently lied or simply made up responses to important questions and that this disturbing behavior continues in his appointments.
Agreed.
But I wonder if starting from a standpoint of ‘rejecting compromise and understanding’ is our ‘best thinking, teaching and organizing’ and likely to result in our most ‘creative solutions.’
If this means rejecting any suggestion that we have changed our minds about how disgusting and dangerous and offensive Trump is, or sitting in silence as he appoints the worst bottom feeders from the swamp… Agreed
If this means we will not compromise or forgo or ease up our ongoing efforts to protect the vulnerable, to advance equal rights and social justice, than say that. Do not say we must reject compromise and understanding, because that is not our best thinking.
If this means that we believe the empathy gap is much larger in the other direction, say that, not that we reject calls to understand…since our concern about the empathy gap demonstrated by Trumpism is itself a call to focus on the importance of understanding.
But these are not what the language chosen says, thus this is not our best thinking and the imprecision matters because it is only one step from a reasonable person concluding something like this…
As written, the statement says we refuse to try to understand or compromise, we reject the importance of trying to understand or compromise…broadly, suggesting there is nothing we fail to understand about our situation or about the many different types of voters who supported this disgusting disruptor or about the complex policy challenges we face and that working with our opponents is off the table…which is precisely what Mitch McConnell said when he wanted to ensure government would not be able to function, democracy would weaken, and our most vulnerable would therefore suffer even more.
If are promising our ‘best thinking’ aimed at ‘creative solutions’ let’s start now.
Finally, since we know that the right, and even more so today the alt-right, dominates mass media messaging in ways that confound any effort to find creative solutions, we are similarly not putting forth our ‘best thinking’ when we pretend that a call to ‘let the media do its job’ is even remotely close to the kind of ‘best thinking’ analysis required here (or even remotely honest as an assessment of our concerns about our information system).
Problems with my analysis? No doubt. First, I am a privileged white man and almost certainly, as a result, fail to fully appreciate the situation as experienced by those in less privileged positions.
Second, it makes good sense for more disadvantaged groups to state their positions as strongly as possible, since the interplay of politics always pushes back on these to the detriment of everyone other than the already privileged.
Third, in a context where the most powerful groups are rhetorically free wheeling, willing to repeatedly just make things up and ignore the best available data, a focus on more finely calibrating the rhetoric of dissent may be more self-defeating than I am anticipating.
Nevertheless, I humbly suggest we consider this...
We reject any call to compromise or understand that is designed to suggests we have changed our views on the president-elect. We reject any such call that is a forked tongue effort to normalize a president-elect we continue to see as deeply dangerous and unfit for leadership.
We accept the outcome of the election; we reject that accepting that tabulation, and moving forward in our ongoing democratic struggles, includes a lessening of our opposition to the policy agenda of our president-elect or our disgust at the life he lives and the priorities he exemplifies.
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