SCALES #71: precise enmity
Hello!
I hope you’ve been doing all right. This week has been a prime example of what I identified in those innocent days of… one week ago:
“I feel neither equipped to address this week’s Situation in the newsletter nor comfortable pretending nothing is going on, so I’ll just give it a week and see how things are looking then.”
I’ve been angry and upset and sad about the insurrection. I don’t pretend to have any kind of special insight or understanding of how to make sense of it or what to do. All I can think to do with this space is share some responses that have been helpful to me in trying to, as Teju Cole puts below, “Describe the problem properly.”
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Teju Cole, via his Instagram story:
Brooke Gladstone during an On the Media segment, “What Do We Call This?”: “It wasn’t just a mob. And that’s why the choice of words is so crucial. Unless we can describe it, we won’t be ready next time.”
Jamelle Bouie surgically dismantling a false equivalence: “To compare the riots of last summer to the siege on Wednesday is to make a category error.”
Sarah Smarsh with a thread addressing the continuing classist myths surrounding Trumpism: “The persistent notion created and embraced by white liberals that Trumpism is about the “ignorant” and “uneducated” is willful denial of the extent and severity of white supremacy.”
Anne Helen Peterson chronicling the absurdity of living in productivity culture at a time like this: “How to Work Through a Coup”.
Ryan Broderick digging into the structural vulnerabilities of social media platforms to extremist content: “The only thing that can satisfy the impossible time-on-site demands of sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are hatred and conflict.”
Eric Holthaus drawing the links between achieving climate justice and confronting white supremacy.
Garrett Bucks positioning the insurrection in the context of our white supremacist culture and with a call to action:
“But then, for those of us who are white, we’ve got a decision to make. After the initial grief, rage, what-have-you, are we ready to ask ‘what are we actually angry at here?’ … Yesterday’s actions were designed to shut down forward progress, to make hope unimaginable. I get it. … If what you’re actually angry about is our intense white selfishness and entitlement, the violence of our hissy fits, the craven way we risk the country to get our way, then the answer isn’t just to condemn what happened yesterday. It’s to practice doing the opposite of that in your corner of the world. We didn’t get to this coup because of anything that happened in the past month or four years. So too is it true that we won’t build a truly better world in a day, month or year. Take a beat to be mad or sad. But when you’re ready, set your gaze not on the Capitol building, but on the corner of the world you can transform and build. And then let’s work patiently and steadfastly together.”
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A corner of the world
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—Adam