The past two weeks since my 40th birthday have induced many people in the US to panic. We’ve watched in horror (if lacking surprise) as particularly immigrants, trans folks, Palestinians and those who advocate for them, and disabled people, (as well as anyone suspected of engaging in that sneaky “DEIA” work) were placed under increasing threat. Our hearts beat faster and our breathing got ragged as we scrolled through article after article, leak after leak. Our vision shrank, our sweat trickled down. We panicked.
And when E— M— illegally took control of sensitive servers and shut down USAID, we said—
Wait, let’s pause. We’re on the edge of a shift here, do you see? We were feeling, sensing, engaging our bodies. We’re about to do something different.
—we said, “It’s a coup! It’s a constitutional crisis! It has to be stopped!” It felt like the end of the world.
We named it. We interpreted what it was, but not just that: We interpreted what our feelings meant. And with that interpretation came conclusions about what to do. Our heartbeats told us we needed to do something now Now NOW. Our breathing told us we were in immediate danger. Our vision narrowed to what we, lone individuals, could do to protect our selves our family our friends our people. And our sweat blamed us when we, as lone individuals, were so overwhelmed with the sheer magnitude of the problem that we completely shut down. Because what, in the face of the end of the world, can one lone individual do?
But…can we return to the pause? The moment before? When we were feeling, just feeling? Could it go a different way?
—we said, “It’s a coup. It’s an outgrowth of the white supremacist and settler colonial structures that we’ve enabled to get this far. The world that this grew out of needs to be remediated.”
Pause. Breathe. What does it mean to feel our feelings, sit in them and move in them and allow them to wash over us? Even when it feels like the end of a world?
I’m someone who feels very deeply, and that has brought with it struggles with anxiety. But over the last year or so, I’ve been reading more about Indigenous ethics and it’s been helping me recognize that the ways I learned to interpret my anxieties are not just a problem because therapeutic frameworks make them so, but because they reinvest in colonial structures.
You see, I’ve felt these same feelings of panic before, many times. Fast heart, shallow breath, sweaty palms. Except: Once it was simply trying to make sure a group of African speculative fiction guest speakers got to a university-sponsored panel on time. Just that. Nothing near the level of governmental coup. But I felt the pressure of invisible consequences, even if I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what they were. Shingai Njeri Kagunda in particular noted my anxiety and how it was manifesting and asked, “Have you ever read about the white supremacist sense of urgency?”
I hadn’t. But after that I did. In 1999, Tema Okun wrote a list of characteristics naming how white supremacy structures organizational culture, and it continues to be just as relevant as it was when originally published. Reading it, I recognized a lot of the aspects of white supremacy culture from not only the organizations I took part in, but the ways that I myself took part in them. One of those aspects was the sense of urgency.
This needs to be fixed.
This needs to be fixed now.
And it needs to be fixed by me.
At this point you might be starting to get itchy, thinking to yourself, “Wait, is she saying that this coup isn’t urgent? That we shouldn’t fix it?”
No, not at all. What I’m saying is that the way white supremacy culture has made a sense of urgency feel ubiquitous means that we’ve internalized responses that won’t actually fix it. As Okun describes, “The irony is that this imposed sense of urgency serves to erase the actual urgency of tackling racial and social injustice.”
Let’s think about this: What does the white supremacist sense of urgency ask us to do in response to E— M—’s destabilization of the US dollar and dissolution of USAID? It needs to be fixed, and it needs to be fixed now, and it needs to be—
—returned to the status quo. Enshrined tighter, perhaps, so that no one can ever threaten it like this again. We’ll breathe easier, we think, when USAID is safely back in place. When the US dollar again sets the groundwork for global currency. When our stock markets control global financial flows again.
When everything’s back to normal.
That is, white supremacy culture is what tells us this is the end of the world, instead of the end of a world. It advocates for putting everything back where it was and fortifying the walls around it so that the systems we have, built in stolen Native lands with the labor of enslaved Black people, can be even further entrenched in place.
The white supremacist sense of urgency doesn’t let us get to the more complicated question: What if we’ve reached this crisis precisely because the world we’ve built has been built through the very same logics underlying the takeover we’re currently seeing? That this isn’t so much a constitutional crisis as it is a constitutional outgrowth: An extension of the ways that rights have always been differentially distributed, with some people being understood as things to bolster the humanness of others, in this country.
Pause. Breathe. Feel. What do we do with these feelings, then?
We feel them. And then pause. And before interpreting what comes next, we breathe and remember how the air connects us to everything on this planet. How we are composed of water, just like the ocean. And resist the urge to individualize, to think we’re the only people who feel or have ever felt these feelings. Instead, we reach out, feel the porousness of our experience, and connect to the deeper context that remembers everyone whose world has ended before, whose worlds continue to end precisely because of the way the US government has been operating up until this point. And we advocate, together, for something beyond the status quo to which urgency would have us return.
What does it look like to make sure people have longterm and consistent access to HIV/AIDS medication without it relying on a structure that was constructed as a form of Cold War anticommunist soft power? What might it look like to engage with other countries through equitable and reciprocal relations rather than paternalistic forms of control? What kind of world might allow for the distribution of pharmaceuticals in ways that center people’s lives and wellbeing rather than profit? What might governmental moves toward the dissolution of capitalist imperialism look like? How can we advocate collectively for all of this, rather than a simple return to what we’ve had in place?
The US is in crisis. One world is ending. What will we dare to imagine in its place?
Jenna Hanchey 