SCOTUS Goddamn! Virginia Goddamn! Tennessee Goddamn! | by Esmée Streachailt
Essay | Strategic Intersectionality, Civil Rights, SCOTUS, and the Power of Memory
Surely, I will not be the only writer reaching for Nina Simone this weekend, and I will not pretend to feel the way my black sisters and cousins do. I can say that I see you. That I am feeling ever more committed to my feminist solidarity with you. And for we who are not feeling this moment in our bodies as you are, I punctuate this post with Nina’s voice because it did, very baldly, register this feeling from her body.
Don't worry, deeper cuts below.
While my mother’s body knitted me into being, both King and Kennedy were cut down. I was born the November we should have elected Bobby Kennedy (the one who was worth a shit). Imagine that timeline! A whole wave of possible liberty and wellbeing was set abruptly back in 1968. Then as now, we who seek a wider franchise and richer dignity for our neighbors, were frustrated by a largely lethargic if not recalcitrant Democratic party. And now we have come to hell and high water.
Hell & High Water
This week, Virginia’s redistricting was effectively quashed by the state Supreme Court, and the national Supreme Court vivisected the Voting Rights Act, so within 24 hours both Tennessee and Alabama went on a gleeful spree to redistrict black voters out of all influence. And as reminder in this conversation at the Bulwark, it’s AFTER white people consolidate power comes the segregation and lynching. The danger does not lag behind. It is ahead and it is turning around to face us again.
It is all Project 2025, Project 205, and the simmering narcissistic rage-wound of these men. You, my sisters, and we warned and warned and alarmed our way through 2024 that this time was different, this time they came ready to move fast and break everything. And they, out there, with their progressive or conservative precious fucking sssssSingle Issuesss, they did not listen and did not believe (women) again. They did not do the most basic math.
Where was CPAC held during the Biden Administration? Hungary. Which industry decided to get its brand dirty with politics? Tech. Who very likely bought this election? Musk. Where are all of Trumps favorite leaders? In countries where people are fodder for their regimes. Did the Heritage Foundation or Stephen Rat Faced Nazi Miller even temper any of their stated ambitions? Not a whit.
The Border!!! The Bathrooms!!! The TERFS!!! Words are Violence!!! — No, baby child, Words are not violence. What is coming, though, it is. It will be both bloodless and bureaucratic and bloody and brutal. None of these single issues will change that. None of that will feed you or make you safe or let you relax in your confident, respected bodies and live at ease in your liberty. The leopard as already passed us all and is slowing down a gear.
Mississippi declared April Confederate Heritage Month this year. Gods, they have threatened do to that most of my conscious life. And we have all seen what toxic sludge the manosphere is mainlining into (mostly) white young men in place of their human personalities. I am not giving up on us, and I am going to withdraw from any alliance that helps stamp out this fire and use its ash to mix the mortar and concrete of a world of lived liberty.
Pretty soon the only move we will have in November, if we have one, will be to mobilize historically galactic numbers of white voters to get in the booth and do the right thing (which is fucking stretch) – and that over new outrageous ID requirements (which is a fucking insult). Can we? See the hungry, pride-injured animal turning around ahead to take our measure? Can we both step out of its way and quell its fury? We do have to.
Imprint & Generation
All the teachers and professors I ever had, across racial lines, every adult I knew until my 40s had lived experience and living memory of the Jim Crow years and the Civil Rights Movement. Many adored Bobby Kennedy, and not all of them approved of the movement – but they all lived and were marked by those years. I was deeply imprinted by their comportment as citizens, their seriousness as shapers of my moral and intellectual world view, and their grace. AND their (usually genteel) stalwart racism and all its obviously bullshit rationalizations. My favorites among those adults were still furious at ongoing oppressions and marginalization, still abashed at the US’s special talent for forgetting what a murderous asshole it can be when (as always) in the bloody hands of so many white (mostly) men.
A whole, whole bunch of adults now do not have that imprint. They don’t know the stories of Tulsa, and East St Louis, and Rosewood that were already long-old when I came along to learn them. It’s not their fault they're new, but their teachers have given them a queer-washed consumer progressivism that dislodges and discomforts not one iota of status quo, professional managerial class, corporate, or hostile political Power. Why? Because not having that imprint seems to have denied these generations and their teachers and professors any understanding of actual, brute, material power at all.
I would love for them to read about it rather than live through this new iteration with Palantir in the mix.
Free, Free, Free Palestine. Center the most vulnerable (mostly white, genetically male) people. Fuck ICE. OK. And? And what now, kids? This is power coming at them too. It has taken their measure next to ours, sisters and cousins, and betting its odds are grrrreat. This is Power’s moment they feel. This is Male Supremancy, White Supremancy, Christian Supremacy, Normative Heterosexual Jubilee!!! (Oh, yes, that word is deliberate.) That is Power. Law. Structure.
Why in the ever loving glory of the stars could the Left (the marginally better team) NOT DEPLOY THE POWER THEY GET THEY HAD IT? Power is meant to be used. That is its entire purpose – to effect, to shape, to determine. It doesn't have to be oppressive. That part is a choice. But not making the other choice, is also making that bad choice.
Cowardice has all the magnitude and amplitude of wickedness.
Antifa or Bust, Y’all
It is All Against the Fascists or none of us. Obvious, sure, but also not. Some operating in the name of women’s rights or civil liberties have been ambivalent of or even embraced the right-far-right – way too many white women, some people of color, some immigrants, too. We can fight all that out later, but for now I am inviting you to drop your new MAGA friends like the face-eating-leopards they are and get yourselves together.
Women, all ages, races, sexualities, classes, believers or no, all hair colors, subcultures, fandoms, AND pronouns – I ask you, do you want TO VOTE in 2028? They do not. They are planning to make sure you can not. They’ll do to the 19A exactly what they just did to the CRA and the VRA.
If THE VOTE is not Intersectionality Strategic nothing is.
With care and for a future we want to live in,
Esmée and Medusa Rising
