on white performative anxiety on election night
Ok, here we go. I had decided that I would not watch the election results unfold last night because quite frankly–it was clear that it would be a close race, and just like with sports games it takes a particular type of narcissistic imagining to think that constant watching will change the impact of an event simply because you watch it. Also, this isn’t a sports game–it’s people’s lives. So I ordered a pizza and worked through three unread X-Men collections (decent, by the way–especially the new take on Marauders).
By 8pm I was getting frequent texts, and despite putting my phone in another room, i heard the buzzing enough to get me off the couch. I logged onto social media to see a flood of white Democrats having a complete meltdown as if the election had been called. And that same existential dread/despair cataclysmically reverberating across social media in New Zealand, South Africa, and Australia. I was so confused. What the actual fuck were people upset about? He hadn’t conceded. Most states hadn’t been called. The responses felt so much like being in high school or college where I’d studied for exams and felt reasonably prepared but then got overwhelmed in the psychic energy of performed anxiety/fear/studying that everyone did around finals. Hell, in pre-covid times I had to limit my time on campus as a professor in the last week because the palpable miasma of fear/anxiety/performative freaking out was too much for me, even though I WAS JUST GRADING THE FINALS. Honestly, I was baffled. Why were people like this? They knew that Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania were not going to count their early voting polls first, and the in person would screw Republican. WHY WERE THEY FREAKING OUT?
And then it slowly dawned on me. They really had believed their own lies. They thought there was going to be a magical, massive blue wave of repudiation of President Trump, after the xenophobia, the racism, the wanton cruelty, the vicious fascism. They needed to believe that this moment would redeem them, this electoral moment would fix them. And they were mourning, almost disproportionately, this sense of utter collapse. They were treating the reality of the closeness of the election as somehow equivalent to the idea of a Trump re-election victory. What the actual hell.
I started to see a lot of “I can’t believe it’s even this close” statuses. I put down my pizza in annoyance and kept reading. There were so many variations on the time-honoured “this is not who we are” canard so many people tell themselves about America. People were mourning, in real time, the lie they’d told themselves. There was a fundamental believe that Trumpism, the vile populism and toxic mix of racism and other oppressive elements, was an “aberration” that could be corrected. There was a willing disbelief that this was not part of the very core of this country, that ‘America’ as a concept is a bad place–one made entirely possible through enslavement and genocide and one that was absolutely fixable through a simple electoral action. And it’s wild, because that’s never been the case. Not now, not ever. I remember in 2008, being overwhelmed by white people wanting to celebrate Obama with me, but I was also keenly aware of racism and the fact that my own state had just voted to take away same-sex marriage. Dr. Jim Barrett, a professor in my graduate program at Illinois, stopped me, a new, black graduate student who he didn’t know, and said, “isn’t the election great?” and i said, “I’m from California, and I’m more worried also about how easily people can dismiss queer rights.” He paused for a second, and then said, “but we did it this time with Obama!” Here was a full-grown man with a PhD in American history casually telling a black graduate student (WHOSE NAME HE DID NOT EVEN KNOW) how great it was to be able to absolve oneself of responsibility via an electoral process, and to imagine an America without self-criticism, just redemption.
And that’s what was at the heart of this baffling pre-capitulation, one that exceeded even the easy stereotype of the always-losing Democrats. BIDEN HADN’T EVEN LOST. He had (and as of now still) leads in electoral votes! But everyone was moaning, gnashing teeth, and grieving. But what they were really grieving was their own innocence. Their naïve assumption that they could be the heroes in a story, in a history of violence that was expressly built for them, even if they wanted to deny it. Trumpism sells a fantasy of white revanchism, of recovery, and even those whites who imagine otherwise can’t exorcise it via a ballot because the entire system of it is at its core, still violent and racist. Y'all seriously wanted a parade, a movement repudiating this. What America do you live in? Did we not go through the same black summer? Of course we didn’t. You saw this summer as a moment of profound alliance building and a recapturing of a mythical value of inclusion. We saw it with surprise–oh white people either just realized that black lives are cheap, or they were sufficiently bothered/bored enough to perform about it.
So much of this is a navel-gazing performance of anxiety. 2016 was traumatizing for people who didn’t want to think Trumpism was America, but it IS. And it’s done in your name.
This morning, I saw even more of this. A friend and colleague wrote a lengthy status about her anxiety about it all and hope that 'good’ would prevail, and bemoaned the lack of a real wave of change. A friend, family member, or colleague of theirs immediately commented with pro-Trump sloganeering. And she did nothing. She kept commenting. This broke me for a second. How could she not see what a joke all of this was? What she was? Here she was bemoaning a lack of some sort of prelapsarian goodness, trying to make some sort of “we’ll get through this message,” and she couldn’t even see what she was doing. There was no acknowledgment, no censuring, no pushback, no RESPONSE to the Trump sloganeering, because she could not fathom the idea that this was connected to HER. The disappointment she felt, that so many people expressed on social media? It was performative, it was a mourning one’s inability to distance oneself from genocidal, suicidal logics of all of this populist turpitude. She couldn’t even denounce the very Trumpism on her own fucking wall, in response to her comment. Of course there was no blue wave, of course there was no rebuking. Why should there be? There are no consequences. Just white folk hoping civility will save them, with the same baffling surety as King Canute commanding the waves to cease lapping at the feet of his throne. The whole event felt like a farce–people attempting to distance themselves from a violence done in their name by refusing to even pushback against he very violence that endangers millions of people, incarcerates children, kills with impunity.
I feel, once again, like I’m the one person who felt confident for an exam during finals week. Everyone’s freaking the fuck out, performing, demonstrating a goodness, trying to foolishly imagine the country as good. I think back to March, when black voters in South Carolina made very clear what was going to happen. White people were not coming to save them. Electoral legerdemain was not going to happen, there was no last minute deus ex machina. There was the brutal calculus that many people don’t see the fascism as bad, and remain so insulated that they don’t care if the brute returns, so much as the lesser peoples are put in their place. Those black voters saw that their best chance was the utter uninspiring, safe, and milquetoast flavour of whiteness, Joe Biden. And they were right. We can push that one, perhaps. Make changes. But this was always going to be a bitter slog, and at most, a close thing. America is a bad place. We cannot redeem it through performance, through simply voting. We don’t exorcise our structural violence with selfies and dashes of ink on sealed papers.
Now that we know this, we can actually push back against the attempted voter fraud that IS happening right now, and then hope that this mediocre blue man wins. And then maybe y'all can join us in doing the hard, daily work that also involves critically acknowledging our own complicity, investment, and inclusion in a violent, illegitimate space. We have to live in these contradictions, to push and transform it, and remember that there are no cheat codes here. Just grinding work, and no cookies or congratulation.
Be fucking better, y'all.
SUMS IT UP QUITE SUCCINCTLY!
