by Fig
A loving push to reconsider any fidelity to the political-economic-social entity called “America” in these revolutionary times
What is “America” anyway? That’s a question each of us should contend with, now more than ever. Our words carry worlds.
A concept like “America,” while ambiguous and fluid, carries specific histories, ideologies, and norms. Put simply, it has baggage. More precisely, it has an inherent and structuring logic that benefits a colonial elite at the expense of the rest of us. It is time for us to face it: the project of “America” has never been for your benefit – no matter what they’ve told/sold us, or what we might have hoped.
America’s M.O. is enslavement, is land theft, is exploitation. The story of America is the story of imperialism – it is the choking and plunder of the land, not only Turtle Island but every part of the Earth it can get its grubby abuser hands on.
The recent escalation of brutality and white supremacy is just that: an escalation. America has always been brutal, and the system it imposes through its ill-gotten authority has always served to bolster white supremacy and capitalist wealth-hoarding. So, when we see the American project faltering, intensifying, spreading itself too thin, lying to our faces, we should push harder against it, not cling to its illusions.
You, my dear comrade – living, breathing, loving you – are not what I mean by ‘America.’ America is not the people; America is the guise of the peoples’ antagonist. All that is good about this place currently called the U.S.A. is in spite of the American project, not because of it. From its beginning, the authority of “America” on this landscape and over our lives has been bitterly contested. The pockets of safety we’ve been able to carve for ourselves in all our wild, multicultural, queer, feminist, and neurodiverse splendor are the result of (unceasing) militant movements against the machinations of “America.” Such movements for autonomy, sovereignty, and liberation have offered visions of a world beyond the hierarchical capitalist system upheld by America – and yet, America seeks to absorb these histories into its own image while leaving the root structure intact. This muddies our struggle: suddenly we are not seeking liberation, but recognition; we are not seeking the end to war, but a seat at the table of war-making.
This will not suffice. As Michi Saagiig Nishaabeg writer and scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson articulates in her book ‘A Short History of the Blockade’, an adamant “no” is a way to make space for a generative and powerful “yes” – when we reject the premise of America, we no longer have to operate by its (inconsistent and unfair) rules of how to ‘make change’, we can reclaim our power to build a better world On Our Own Authority.
Artists, poets, care workers, gardeners, craftspeople, educators – anyone working towards collective flourishing is doing so because they believe in it, because their humanness demands it, but we are choked by America. “You don’t deserve to be compensated, fed, or sheltered; nor do you get to have health care or affordable higher education; instead you may go into debt,” says America. America wants to see you worked to death (or to take up a career in tech…). America wishes you would just fall in line, give up on that Red / Black / Immigrant / Worker Power shit, so it wouldn’t have to send its thugs out to brutalize you. Who am I kidding, America loves to brutalize you. It makes it feel big and tough. Daddy issues probably.
Well fuck that. We will make our own safety through solidarity. We will feed each other with the food we grow, decorate each other’s homes with the art we make, take care of each other’s kids and teach them to play the banjo. We do not need America. Now is the time for LAND BACK – let’s not forget: America is a settler-colonial invasion (in the present tense!). Let’s get clear about what side we are on. The time has come to un-identify with “America” and re-associate with each other, the land we live on, Indigenous sovereignty, and movements for liberation globally.
America wants to see the living Earth reduced to rubble for the economic benefit of a few sociopathic heirs. America can’t see the sacredness of the rivers, can’t comprehend the wisdom of old growth forests, and doesn’t understand that you can’t drink oil. The land is not America either. The land resists America. The land wants to support you, share with you, luxuriate under the sun in collective abundance. America won’t let it.
If you still believe we can reason with America, reform it, well, I encourage you to try – genuinely. I think participating in political organizing is the quickest way to realize that the American systems of governance some call “democratic” are set up to distract, delay, and ultimately quash any effort to re-distribute power and wealth. It’s exhausting and disheartening. Yet, you may meet some comrades and collaborators in the process, you might develop your theory of change, you might start to build networks of solidarity, you might, then, for example, be able to rebuild each other’s homes in the aftermath of a supercharged storm, in spite of America. You may realize that you don’t need America after all.
But where does this leave us? There are many possible paths forward. One framework that makes sense to me is the ‘divest/invest’ model advocated by abolitionists and other militant movements. It is rooted in the simple notion that we begin to ‘divest’ or stop investing the resources of our lives (time, energy, labor, money, even attention) in the structures of American power/the State, and begin to ‘invest’ these resources into our communities. In doing so, we diminish the (already illegitimate) authority of ‘America’ and build the capacity for taking care of each other and ourselves, developing our own power. We can’t just turn away from the reality of America (the bloated military makes sure of that); but once we figure out where we stand, we can work to diminish its power over us and in the world. This is a subtle but major shift for a lot of us: we need to stop settling for reforms that only serve to invest more resources in and rehabilitate the illusion of America. As we (hopefully) all learned from the George Floyd uprisings, when they say “police reform” and “body cams and sensitivity training” what they mean is “more money for the police.” This is obviously insufficient, when what we need is to abolish the police and prisons and re-allocate those resources to community-directed initiatives like free food programs, health clinics, non-carceral justice processes, and free education.
The loss of the illusion of America can come with some hard feelings. Fear and uncertainty – grief, even. When you are conditioned your whole life to understand the world and your role in it through the prism of nation-states and the capitalist economy, your sense of yourself and the dreams you hold can become wrapped up in the project of America – even if it isn’t serving you, even if you are watching it destroy everything. It is a deeply emotional process to reconceptualize your internal world to oppose something that attempts to be so totalizing. I am with you in the uncertainty, but take heart that it is neither reckless nor idealistic to desire the end of America – it is tactical. We don’t need America, because we keep us safe. Don’t do PR for empire by clinging to its illusions out of fear. Many of you, I hope, have already begun the process of building a new world in the shell of the old – you have figured out that the ostensible “safety and order” imposed by America is not true safety for you and your community, and started to find ways to live otherwise. This is the path towards healing, liberation, and empowerment; one where we can relinquish the false security of America and build the rich and meaningful lives we deserve.
I do not mean to sound flippant or facetious; this is a very dangerous time. The violence being unleashed is immense, and the stakes are quite literally the whole world. We are witnessing American-enabled genocide in Palestine, unabashed imperialist invasion in Venezuela and Cuba, I.C.E. kidnapping and murdering community members across Turtle Island, not to mention the ever-worsening ecological crisis and many other global injustices. But it would be a mistake to think this is an aberration, an anomaly – no, the veil is being lifted: this is America and it always has been. The path towards liberation is an abolitionist one, there is no reforming this. We can do better than America. We must. We just have to find the courage to try.
A few books that have informed this article, for further reading:
- “As Black As Resistance” by Zoe Samudzi and William C. Anderson
- “Blood In My Eye” by George Jackson
- “Red Skin, White Masks” by Glen Coulthard
- “Autonomy Is In Our Hearts” by Dylan Eldredge Fitzwater
- “Intimate Direct Democracy” by Modibo Kadalie
- “The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study” by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten