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Liberal commentary on riots, especially on those carried out by young, black and poor people, often becomes hypercritical of the choice of targets of damage. There is marginally more sympathy for the act of smashing a Walmart window than a local mom-and-pop setup. Certainly, I’d rather see a retail giant, famed for worker abuses, smashed and burned than I would a small, local business. But above that, I also privilege the political force of a riot over the preservation of shop windows. Collective fury, inscribed onto urban terrain in the form of property damage, can be an assertion of presence and power in the face of authorities who would rather these young people remain invisible, silenced, imprisoned or dead. The disruption and destruction says it all, and it needs little accounting for in this instance. Revolutionary theorist Frantz Fanon put it well in his 1961 Wretched of the Earth: “When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because we can no longer breathe.”
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To tell a furious community that their riotous actions are counterproductive patronizes the very groups who know too well that “acceptable channels” of political engagement have failed, again and again, to deliver dignity and justice to black life. Further, it ignores, as Osterweil notes, that major riots (and the threat of more) during the civil rights era helped force JFK’s hand in calling for historic legislation: “To argue that the movement achieved what it did in spite of rather than as a result of the mixture of not-nonviolent and nonviolent action is spurious at best.”
Beyond questions of justifying riots, a categorical error is made in any narrative resting on the idea of a violent “turn” in such protests. The very idea of a demonstration like those in Ferguson “turning violent”—as it was described in standard media parlance—mislocated and thus misframed violence in this context.
The error exists in the tacit suggestion that there was a situation of nonviolence, or peace, from which to turn. To be clear: any circumstance in which cops take black life with impunity, any context in which it is still necessary to state that Black Lives Matter, is a background state of constant violence.
Riotous protesters do not bring violence; the violence was there in the DNA of white supremacy and our world through which it permeates. Protester violence here is counterviolence in history’s unbroken dialectic of violence and counterviolence. Even a rhetoric of police turning violent during a specific protest ignores that policing, as an institution in this country, functions as a force of consistent violence against black life. And more often than not, cops’ roles as violent instigators are erased from media narratives. The malignant euphemism “officer involved shooting” says it all.
An overreliance on the language of First Amendment rights treats the state—the Trumpian, corporate, white supremacist state—as an interlocutor, instead of as an enemy. When we call upon the government to recognize our right to peaceful assembly, we appeal to the democratic conscience of the state. “A conscience,” as British cultural critic John Berger noted in a 1968 essay in the journal International Socialism, “which is very unlikely to exist.”
Berger highlighted a conflict inherent to the sort of public demonstrations that First Amendment rights aim to defend: “If the State authority is open to democratic influence, the demonstration will hardly be necessary; if it is not, it is unlikely to be influenced by an empty show of force containing no real threat.” It’s safe to say we live in a moment when it is clear and correct to distrust the state’s openness to democratic influence.
Berger did not reject the significance of legal protests—which manage to show, in their peaceful numbers, the potential for revolutionary action (if very rarely)—but he saw their limitations insofar as they are empty shows of force unlikely to influence the state. A rights discourse, which is only useful to defend this sort of protest, will thus echo its main limitation: defense of that which is no real threat to the powers that be.
Remember how Meryl Streep’s character (editor in chief of an influential fashion magazine) in The Devil Wears Prada chastises Anne Hathaway’s character (the naive assistant) for thinking she had agency when she’d chosen to buy a blue sweater? A Foucauldian point well made: capital didn’t make her choose and buy that color sweater, but it did overdetermine the conditions of possibility for any such purchase.
In a skewering 2015 essay for Mask Magazine, the writer who goes by FuckTheory coined the term “queer privilege,” as if he’d had my ex in mind. He notes that while “there is still a bigoted wide world out there, full of enforced normativity, compulsory heterosexuality, and relentless, violent policing … there are also spaces … where a generalized ideology of anti-normativity holds sway, queerness is a badge of honor, a marker of specialness, and a source of critical and moral authority: in short, a form of privilege.” FuckTheory’s contention with what he calls queer privilege is that such attitudes, and the deep irony of their basis in a misunderstanding of Foucault, are “grounded in the idea of a link between the normativity of an act and its ethical valence.”
He puts it better than I ever could: “It’s worth pausing to reflect on the tone that queer privilege indulges itself in, to consider the implications of a smug condescension that presumes to judge people’s sexuality based on the way they relate to other people’s genitals and to evaluate the revolutionary potential of an act based on its statistical prevalence. Is this what we want from queer theorizing?” The counterargument to queer privilege is not to retreat to the reactionary normativities that queerness, even privileged queerness, attempts to disrupt. No, the radical thing is not actually to be a straight couple and get married and make babies and reproduce oneself as the world produced you. It’s not actually more radical to be monogamous just because everyone and their panamorous triad is meeting in an expensive bar in Williamsburg and reveling in their radical performance. Such a counterreaction would merely repeat the problem of inherently linking the normativity or abundance of a given act with its ethical weight.
“The California Ideology”—the dream (dreamt by a handful of rich, white men in the early 1990s) that the internet would be a democratizing force of decentralized power and knowledge—was always a myth born of myopic thinking, one which failed to take into account that the internet was born within, not beyond, the strictures of capitalist relationality and brutal social hierarchy. Public access to information expanded on a vast scale, but at the same time, consolidation of power over the information network was stunning. As writer and neuro-scientist Aaron Bornstein has pointed out,
Each year more data is being produced—and, with cheap storage and a culture of collection, preserved—than existed in all of human history before the internet. It is thus literally true that more of humanity’s records are held by fewer people than ever before, each of whom can be—and, we now know, are—compelled to deliver those records to the state.
He wonders: What makes the bark twist and swirl so, in a tree so straight and wide? Could it be the spinning of the Earth? Is it trying to get the attention of men? Seven hundred years before, a chestnut in Sicily two hundred feet around sheltered a Spanish queen and her hundred mounted knights from a raging storm. That tree will outlive, by a hundred years and more, the man who has never heard of it.
“Do you remember?” Jørgen asks the woman who holds his hand. “Prospect Hill? How we ate that night!” He nods toward the leafy limbs, the land beyond. “I gave you that. And you gave me—all of this! This country. My life. My freedom.”
But the woman who holds his hand is not his wife. Vi has died five years ago, of infected lungs.
“Sleep now,” his granddaughter tells him, and lays his hand back on his spent chest. “We’ll all be just downstairs.”
IF GOD HAD A BROWNIE, He might shoot another animated short subject: blight hovering a moment before plunging down the Appalachians into the heart of chestnut country. The chestnuts up North were majestic. But the southern trees are gods. They form near-pure stands for miles on end. In the Carolinas, boles older than America grow ten feet wide and a hundred and twenty feet tall. Whole forests of them flower in rolling clouds of white. Scores of mountain communities are built from the beautiful, straight-grained wood. A single tree might yield as many as fourteen thousand planks. The stocks of food that fall shin-deep feed entire counties, every year a mast year.
Now the gods are dying, all of them. The full force of human ingenuity can’t stop the disaster breaking over the continent. The blight runs along ridgelines, killing off peak after peak. A person perched on an overlook above the southern mountains can watch the trunks change to gray-white skeletons in a rippling wave. Loggers race through a dozen states to cut down whatever the fungus hasn’t reached. The nascent Forest Service encourages them. Use the wood, at least, before it’s ruined. And in that salvage mission, men kill any tree that might contain the secret of resistance.
A five-year-old in Tennessee who sees the first orange spots appear in her magic woods will have nothing left to show her own children except pictures. They’ll never see the ripe, full habit of the tree, never know the sight and sound and smell of their mother’s childhood. Millions of dead stumps sprout suckers that struggle on, year after year, before dying of an infection that, preserved in these stubborn shoots, will never disappear. By 1940, the fungus takes everything, all the way out to the farthest stands in southern Illinois. Four billion trees in the native range vanish into myth. Aside from a few secret pockets of resistance, the only chestnuts left are those that pioneers took far away, to states beyond the reach of the drifting spores.
NOOOOO
AT HOLYOKE, Mimi is a LUG: lesbian until graduation. It’s the same at half of the other Seven Sisters colleges, rounded up. Scissors and paste, they call it. Fun, sinning, healthy, shameful, sweet—great practice for something. Life, say. Whatever happens after school.
She reads nineteenth-century American poetry and drinks afternoon tea in South Hadley for three semesters. It beats Wheaton. But one April day she’s reading Abbott’s Flatland for a sophomore survey called Transcendence, when she reaches the part where the narrator, A. Square, gets lifted out of his plane into the expanses of Spaceland. Truth comes over her like a revelation: The only thing worth believing in is measurement. She must become an engineer, like her daddy before her. It’s not even a choice. She’s an engineer already, and always has been. And as with Abbott’s Square, the minute she comes back to Flatland, her Holyoke friends want to lock her up.
She transfers to Berkeley. Best place for ceramic engineering she can find. The place is a staggering time warp. Future masters of the universe study alongside unrepentant revolutionaries who believe the Golden Age of Human Potential peaked ten years before.
She thrives, reborn Mimi, looking like a diminutive Kazakh carrying a programmable calculator, and, in the estimation of many, the cutest thing ever to mouth the Hall-Petch equation. She savors the eerie Stepford Wives climate. She sits in the eucalyptus grove, the trees that explode in the dry heat, solving problem sets and watching the protesters with their placards full of all-caps slogans. The better the weather, the more irate the demands.
The month before graduation, she dons a killer interview suit—sleek, gray, professional, inexorable as a NoCal earthquake. She interviews with eight campus reps and gets three offers. She takes a job as a casting process supervisor for a molding outfit in Portland, because it offers the most chance to travel. They send her to Korea. She falls in love with the country. In four months, she learns more Korean than she knows Chinese.
IN THE FALL, with his wife in the basement studying Latin, Winston Ma, once Ma Sih Hsuin to everyone who knew him, sits under the crumbling mulberry and, with Verdi’s Macbeth blasting out the bedroom window, puts a Smith & Wesson 686 with hardwood grips up to his temple and spreads the workings of his infinite being across the flagstones of the backyard. He leaves no note except a calligraphic copy of Wang Wei’s twelve-hundred-year-old poem left unfurled on parchment across the desk in his study:
An old man, I want
only peace.
The things of this world
mean nothing.
I know no good way
to live and I can’t
stop getting lost in my
thoughts, my ancient forests.
The wind that waves the pines
loosens my belt.
The mountain moon lights me
as I play my lute.
You ask: how does a man rise or fall in this life?
The fisherman’s song flows deep under the river.
Mimi is in SFO, on her way to Seattle for a site inspection. She’s mock-shopping the concourse when out of the cacophony of gate calls and public service announcements her name blares out. Something cold grabs at her scalp. Before the people at the customer service desk even hand her the phone, she knows. And all the way home to Illinois she thinks: How do I recognize this already? Why does this all feel so much like remembering?