The results of the nation’s most recent presidential election vividly confirms for me what I had already come to believe many years ago: that arguing about and analyzing white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism in the abstract is not only pointless, but self-destructive.
Take, for instance, the tragic case of Chrystul Kizer, a young Black woman who was sentenced to 11 years in prison for defending herself against the serial predator who sexually abused and trafficked her at the age of 16. Chrystul was doubly victimized, first by a man who felt he could prey on her with impunity because she was young, poor, Black, and female, and then by a system that not only chose to ignore the glaringly obvious signs that she was being victimized, but then brutally punished her for acting on her own behalf when that very same system failed in its primary duty to protect her.
Chrystul’s plight largely escaped the nation’s attention, because we were far too preoccupied with our dueling rituals of heaping blessing or blame on the society that stole her dignity and freedom. Of course, in making this observation, I am forced to ask myself, “what have I done to change the reality that created Chrystul’s plight?” And the profoundly distressing answer is, far too little. But I would rather live with that distress, and work to atone for leaving so much undone, than seek the false comfort of abstracting her crushingly painful reality away with vaporous theories of race, class, and gender. Particularly because to do so would triply victimize her, by rendering her into just so much grist for an industry of performative radical critique that is not only helpless to do anything about the things that it critiques, but whose overriding concern appears to be denying the powerless, the oppressed, and the dispossessed the very language they need to even describe their own reality, let alone act upon it.
I expect that there will be some who will take exception to these observations. I don’t care, not because I’m setting out to deliberately cause offense, but because I don’t have the luxury of caring about how people who are not standing shoulder to shoulder with me feel about the fight that I’m in. I don’t care, because Chrystul Kizer is in jail, and the American people have seen fit to give their blessing to the forces that put her there. And the only question that matters for the people who think Chrystul’s life matters at all is this: What do we do now? As for myself, I’ve discerned what appears to be an answer, and I’m working toward making it a reality with all of the skill and dedication that I can muster. Others will have to find their own answer. But whatever the answer to this question is, if it is going to be at all meaningful, it has to be expressed not with words, but with action.
