What do we do now?

Yesterday as I walked to my car in weather so unseasonably warm, it frightened me, I thought of my former student, Rawan. I taught her as an incoming freshman in our university’s summer “bridge” program, in the summer of 2016. Our final project was to research an unsavory historical figure using empathy, and write something— a poem, a song, a chapter from a graphic novel— from their perspective. Rawan, an Egyptian-American woman who wears a hijab, sings like an angel, and has since become a TikTok sensation, chose to write from the perspective of Donald Trump. That fall, she took my freshman composition course and, in our presidential debate, played Donald Trump, arriving to class on the big day in a chic black suit and matching hijab, with a MAGA hat. When her classmate who played Hillary Clinton— a young white man in his mother’s pink pantsuit— tried to speak, Rawan bellowed “WRONG” and “CROOKED HILLARY” in an uncanny impersonation of a man who made her skin crawl.

The class was able to vote for the winner of the debate; it wasn’t close. Rawan’s Trump won in a landslide, proof of our ability to see inside the other, speak in their voice. I was eight years younger than, and it feels like another universe. I had a great deal of hope, but it was singularly mixed with dread, a feeling that was new to me, then. The feeling has evolved. Yesterday, as I walked toward my car in the golden light of November, I quietly sang the lyrics to “One Last Time,” from the Hamilton soundtrack. I had used it in class last Monday, to teach a revamped version of the research project on empathy and the other. It hadn’t occurred to me until after class was over that history was repeating itself, and warning me— he was going to win, and this time, I had moved on from my naive optimism in Americans’ interest in protecting those less vulnerable. Instead of dread and hope, as we inched closer to yesterday’s election, I felt a singular despair, like a terrible grinding inside me, a knowledge that this would show us who we were and it would be a hideous picture.

And it was. Is, I should say. Just before I left campus, I got bad news— not personal news, but bad news from a colleague about their position on campus, more proof that administrators in education do not care for their teachers, and sometimes (more often than I’d like to say) will actively harm them. It’s a big leap, but I thought, Well, there it is. Everyone wants to know why people in this country are falling for the Big Lie, are so vulnerable to misinformation— because the smartest and best among us kill themselves to teach the public and the very school paying them to do so will kick them around until they finally cave. And they’ll “vote blue” the entire time.

It was a reminder about institutions. My entire life, I was told to put my faith in them— democracy, schools, the church. I have never been able to do this, for many reasons, but since the election of Trump in 2016, it was clear to me that no one was coming to save me on the institutional level. It wasn’t just the American government. From the moment Trump took office in 2017, I watched as the university where I taught, which I had believed, until then, to be a safe and “liberal” space, turned into a dangerous place. Faculty and students were surveilled, and threatened, using institutional mechanisms. The white supremacist group Europa walked onto campus and plastered it with fliers urging students to join. In response, the university put out a statement: the fliers had been removed— because the group in question had not asked permission to post them. When faculty and staff pushed the administration to condemn the group and the message they peddled, we were ignored.

It was clear to me then, as it is clear to me now, that the people in their petty positions of power at the university saw what Trump was up to and thought— I want some of that.

And believe me, they got it.

And they will continue to get it, at institutions across the country, educational and otherwise, until we build a real coalition to end this disaster. But I am sorry to say that— at least to me— that doesn’t remotely look like this last fall’s election. It was evident to me, watching Harris take over the disastrous Biden campaign, that the wheels had come off of American presidential politics. In 2016, and even in the midst of the pandemic-election of 2020, we were able to ape a semblance of normalcy, of what elections once looked like. But not this time. The single debate we were treated to was anything but substantive. And when young people across the country carried the demands they had made about ending an ongoing genocide (one we are all paying for, and have been paying for, for decades) into presidential discourse, they were roundly shut down by the same stupid and exhausting response I have heard for the last eight years— Do you want Trump to be elected? Do you? Well, if not, then shut up, because that’s what will happen.

It is wild to me that so many feminist writers who I admire have either said a version of this, or tacitly remained silent about Gaza, while campaigning for Harris like street preachers. And listen— I do understand. I do understand the fear. The fear of Trump is so real. It is animating every cell in my body as I type this. But it is a fear partly rooted in a false faith in institutions, which are always patriarchal. It tells us that if we can just ignore the worst we have done to the least among us, that we can get this woman into office and she will save us. “Us” in this case is largely white and middle-class women who— at least in this present moment— don’t necessarily need a lot of saving. We live in “blue” states or “blue pockets” in “red” states and we have good insurance and masters degrees and intergenerational wealth. Or anyway, we don’t live in intergenerational poverty. We are proof that we can exploit our privilege while those around us suffer. And the truth is that Roe was precarious for decades prior to 2022. And when those of us who knew it howled at the top of our lungs about it, we were often told we were hysterical by good liberal white men, and some white women. We demanded that candidates like Obama and Clinton do more, do more to protect it. And we were often told to shut up. And we often did. We traded or smothered our rage for the institution, and the institution betrayed us. Because it always will.

And I know— I know: we are fighting to save women in America who have less than us. I hear it, I believe it. But if we refuse to see how our complicity with a genocide in our lifetime— if we can’t even talk about it at a political event— is connected to our own destruction, then I believe we will be destroyed. Which is not to say that I despair. I don’t. I was heartened yesterday, reading an interview with the Black lesbian feminist Barbara Smith, who helped found the Combahee River Collective and founded Kitchen Table Press among other extraordinary accomplishments, in which Smith wrote about how valuable coalition building across difference was to her fellow feminists, in the 1970s and 1980s. She says that her politics are informed by an ethic of care rooted in painstaking attention, meaning, listening. Being quiet so we can really hear what the people working with us for change believe. What are the conditions of their lives? How do they differ from our own? How can I hear you into trusting me, so that we can work together for radical change?

Or, to quote the Combahee River Collective statement, which Smith said this past August is still the basis for her practicing politics, “We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work.”

We cannot, as feminists, claim Smith’s ethic of care or claim to practice intersectional politics and refuse a seat at the table to young people asking us to stop paying for the wholesale slaughter of a people. We cannot claim Smith’s ethic of care or claim to practice intersectional politics and not include Palestinian women miscarrying from dehydration or having C-sections without anesthesia as part of our fight for reproductive freedom. We cannot claim Smith’s ethic of care or claim to practice intersectional politics and tell the people with the most radical ethic of care that they should shut up and elect Harris because then we can “push her left,” while all the evidence points instead to a centrism that worships capitol above all and that is destroying us.

I should call Rawan, I thought, yesterday, on that golden walk in America. We are still a little bit in touch; I have taught two of her beloved siblings in the years since 2016. But I didn’t, because kids and work and dinner and whatever else got in the way. But the universe must have some grace for me yet, because this morning, as I walked to my car after shuttling the kids everywhere they need to go, she had sent me a long text message, reminding me of that terrible fall in 2016, when she “got through this man being elected in classes with you.” She finds herself, now, in the “reverse position”— she is teaching, as a graduate assistant, and wonders how to care for her students.

What could I do, but listen? And then, tell her how grateful I was to her for her friendship. For what she had taught me over the last eight years.

What can any of us do but listen?

Things are going to get harder, now, I suspect. Even for those of us who live with the kind of historic privilege I do— namely, white women in “blue states.” I am telling you, and I hope you listen— the institutions will not save us. We can only save ourselves by building the broadest possible coalitions that elevate the least among us. I know this has nothing to do with Sylvia Plath. I suspect many of you will ignore this or unsubscribe. But it’s all I have for you, today. It’s something to build on.