Two Years…

I’d like to take a moment to reflect on where we are, where we’ve been, and where we may be headed:

Two years ago today, in a mental state that swung between shock and grief, I boarded the Lake Shore Limited at Penn Station in New York City, thus beginning an 8,980 mile listening tour throughout the U.S. I think the vast majority of you who follow this page know what followed: I spoke to dozens of strangers over the course of thirteen days, primarily in the dining cars of Amtrak trains, and then wrote an album and stage piece, “Book of Travelers”, about the experience. (https://gabrielkahane.bandcamp.com)

As I reflect on what’s occurred in the last two years, I feel equal doses of optimism and despair. I am in awe of the hundreds of Americans, many of them women, who, in the face of creeping autocracy, willful ignorance, and hate-slathered rhetoric, chose to run for office for the first time. I am proud to live in a country that elected Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, Sharice Davids and Deb Haaland, Jared Polis, Christine Hallquist, Ayanna Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and so many others. I am proud to live in a country where thousands of my fellow Americans and I were able to demonstrate peacefully at JFK in protest of this administration’s first Muslim ban. I am proud to live in a country where immense pressure in the form of phone calls, sit-ins, town halls, and demonstrations resulted in the failure of the GOP’s attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. I am exhilarated and energized by the fresh ideas that our new congressional majority in the House will bring to the floor, and in particular, by the notion of a Green New Deal that could tackle climate change head-on through the creation of green jobs. And I’m excited for Beto O'Rourke to run for president.

And yet as I write this, two gubernatorial races (Florida, Georgia) that instantiate the festering legacy of Jim Crow hang in the balance, and will likely reward candidates who sought, if not illegally, then unethically, to prevent hundreds of thousands of people of color from voting. With the 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act clearing the way, this week’s elections served as a playground for desperate and cynical advocates of voter suppression, and as a reminder that we have much more work to do if we are to truly become a representative democracy. The only solace on that account, perhaps, was the will of the people of Florida in restoring voting rights to 1.4 million formerly incarcerated people.

In the broader sense, what troubles me most is that for every groundbreaking progressive candidate who was elected, there has been an equal and opposite force of retrenchment in the form of candidates like Steve King in Iowa, Ron DeSantis in Florida, and Brian Kemp in Georgia. These are men who play on the fears of their constituents, using scare tactics that are drawn straight from the 19th century.

We are, in a word, more divided than ever. And I want to propose a subtle corrective to some of the discourse that I see around me in the digital space. For example, yesterday I saw a tweet— retweeted some 30,000 times— that read:

“Here’s the thing about America: it’s racist.”

While I totally get the spirit of the sentiment, statements like that only divide us further, not because I believe we need to tiptoe around ugly truths, but because they lack the specificity necessary to reach the 10 to 15 or even 20 percent of the country that I imagine do not harbor active racial animus but who nevertheless support (perhaps reluctantly) the current administration either because of social or economic conservatism. I would argue that if we want a more enlightened body politic, we can best fight for racial justice by being more exacting in our critique.

It’s useful, for example, to point out that Brian Kemp’s attempts to disenfranchise voters in Georgia through purges, exact match laws, etc., are the inheritance of Jim Crow; it’s useful to talk about implicit bias, and the myriad ways in which it causes daily humiliation to people of color (I’m thinking here of the African-American physician whose qualifications were repeatedly questioned by flight attendants during an in-flight medical emergency last week); it’s useful to talk about housing and mortgage loan discrimination; it’s useful to talk about police violence against unarmed black men; it’s useful to talk about the disproportionate eviction rate among black women in the rental market—and there are, sadly, so many other areas in which structural racism is as present as ever.

It’s less useful, I would argue, to make general proclamations — and I see them all the time — that I suspect feel more weaponized than constructive to those folks in this country whom I believe could come around to our side, but haven’t yet had a eureka moment around their own privilege.

One of the problems with digital spaces like Facebook, and even more so with Twitter, is that they function like public spaces, but without the ability to see who it is you’re speaking to. This leads to what is perhaps the most grievous pitfall of online discourse, which is the belief that we know who we’re talking to when we type into the void, when in fact, our audience is, to a certain extent, unknowable. When we make a statement to our “in group”, and then it’s amplified through shares or retweets outside of our “in group”, our rhetoric may become alien & alienating. It’s for this reason that I think there’s value in trying to visualize our audience when we’re engaging online.

When I’m contemplating a post about racism, or privilege, I often think of the truck driver (USPS in North Dakota, then for a bakery in Florida, then the USPS again) with whom I had breakfast on the Empire Builder two years ago. White man in his sixties, lived just north of the poverty line his whole life. He was a super sweet guy, played upright bass in a family band with his two sisters. Talked about the beauty of the landscape of North Dakota. I don’t know if he voted for Trump or not. I think about him, and I think about how I would make the case to him. I think about the context of his life. I try to envision being at once empathetic and unapologetic.

The guy from North Dakota, who was only able to take the train to his aunt’s 90th birthday party because his sisters bought him a ticket, makes me think more broadly about the structural shift in our economy since 1980, and the roles that Reagan and Clinton played in setting us on a path to the kind of inequality that is rampant today. The kind of ethno-nationalism that’s flourishing in America right now is not a new phenomenon, and historically speaking, it tends to take root under certain economic conditions. Wages have hardly budged in real dollars since 1980, huge sectors of the economy are contracting rapidly, and full employment simply has not translated into a livable quality of life for millions of Americans. It’s under these conditions that a kleptocratic ruling class need a scapegoat (or two or three) to distract citizens from the fact that the economy is structured to widen the gap between rich and poor.

I am not for a moment suggesting that economic vulnerability is an excuse for subscribing to racist ideas, but I am suggesting that it’s worth thinking about the circumstances in which we experience, as a nation, the metastasis of hate. I’m also well aware that plenty of people who were extremely well off voted for Trump. Those folks, the ones who believed they could pick and choose the elements of his platform that they liked (“pro-business, yay; racism, not so much, but I want my tax cut”) — it’s really hard for my to find an iota of empathy for them, but I think again it’s worth mentioning that in the same way that structural racism is baked into our system, so too is structural greed: when you have a tax code that allows the very rich to make off with 80 or 90 cents on the dollar ad infinitum, it incentives greed. (Read Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century” for more on that.) We should make it a priority to restore sanity to our tax code so that folks don’t have the *option* of making morally bankrupt decisions like the ones they made in 2016.

This leads to my final point, which is that if we want to reunite the United States, I would argue, as I’ve argued here before, that equality must transcend (or at least accompany) identity, and that we must remind ourselves that without economic justice, there can be no racial justice. I understand that these arguments, coming from a straight white guy, may rankle to some, but know that they come from someone who wants nothing more than to see a truly just and equitable society. Let’s stay energized as we move toward 2020.