“You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had
a group on the other side that was also very violent.”
-- The White Supremacist-in-Chief in response to Charlottesville.
“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that
the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White
Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more
devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace
which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of
justice.”
--Martin Luther King, Jr.
I am (a few weeks late,
admittedly) obsessed with Tina Fey’s cake sketch. It’s one of the few things in
recent memory that I’ve been able to be even a little equivocal about. She got
some amazing points across, and “Yell it into the cake” will be part of my
lexicon from now on. The way she ate the thing was mesmerizing, a work of art
in and of itself. But to me, her overall takeaway message was one of obedience.
By characterizing protests
as “screaming matches” and advising “good, sane Americans” to stay home, she is
not only dishonoring Heather Hayer’s death, but encouraging a sense of
superiority in those who do nothing. (Having lived through the 2016 election, I
can assure you that the apathetic do not need help feeling superior.) I
appreciate the empathy for my/our post-Trump feelings of fear and helplessness,
but by denigrating anti-Nazi counter-protestors just as much as the
torch-bearing monsters they were standing up to, Tina was (maybe satirically? I
hope?) echoing the president’s claim that there was blame on both sides.
Lumping in all protests
as unproductive and undignified seems especially out of step, considering this
sketch shares a year with THE LARGEST PROTEST IN HUMAN HISTORY, and the
assertion of helplessness is ridiculous, given the number of Confederate
monuments that did come down after Charlottesville. Tina rants into the cake on
the Water Protectors behalf while at the same time insinuating that they and
their allies are less-civilized than those who stay home. Would she tell John
Lewis that he’d participated in “screaming matches,” and that he should have
stayed home? Listing off meaningful protests seems like just as annoying an undertaking
as listing off women who are funny. When you’re starting from a crazy false
premise, no amount of evidence will help.
I think every person with
a platform, large or small, has the moral obligation to loudly and
unambiguously stand with anti-hate action of all kinds. So, from my
so-tiny-as-to-be-almost-nonexistent platform, I’ll say this:
Self care IS resistance,
but resistance is also self-care. If we continue to prioritize our own safety
and ignore threats to our fellow humans, our actions are no longer
self-nurturing but nihilistic. White supremacy isn’t an event that we can
choose to attend or not attend, it is woven so deeply into the fabric of our
society that every single one of us can fight it, in large and small ways,
every day. Helplessness is what Trump wants us to feel, and stress-eating is an
outdated misogynist concept. Dear fellow white ladies, dear everyone: eat for
pleasure and fight like hell for your fellow humans, in whatever way you can.
