Out for 2024: American-centrism Online
"Renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not—safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed." - James Baldwin
Three weeks ago, I was in Djibouti – less than 30 miles away from the coast of Yemen – on the day that the US and nine other countries announced a ‘defense coalition’ to stop Yemen from intercepting ships headed towards Israel. And now, as I write this, I am in South Africa on the eve of what might possibly be a trial that turns the tides of history.
There’s so much I wanted to share about my time in Djibouti, and so much I feel like I still can’t because if there’s anything the past weeks have shown me–aside from the fact that morale is heartwrenching to sustain amidst grief of this magnitude–it’s that the stakes are high, high, high. When I started sharing more from Djibouti, videos of the ships I was witnessing with my own two eyes lined up headed towards the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait – I got an admittedly bizarre, fed-adjacent DM which made me wary of how much I shared, and wary of what visibility (of any scale) invites.
I’ve observed, both through my own experience and by the shares of others (informed also by many years of researching and spiraling and sharing about the surveillance vortex of social media) that there is a level of self-censorship online that will always be requisite to safety for as long as these platforms are brokered by people who are themselves wholeheartedly invested in the maintenance of an thinly-veiled fascist status quo. What is shared lingers; what is shared follows us even when it seems innocuous. I say this not to encourage fear, but to try in my own way to advocate for mindfulness around the realities of the surveillance ecosystems we are constantly navigating.
And while I don’t endorse the kind of silence that is a by-product of complicity, I have found myself longing for sustained collective encouragement towards a chorus of solidarity that also holds compassion for the less visible ways in which we can and must also show up. For more reminders that solidarity is embodied, in as much as it is proclaimed.
It’s also been interesting to feel through the difference between posting or wanting to be engaged from European or North American soil, versus remaining engaged while in the Global South. Now this might be a little contentious to write here because I realize that the majority of the people who subscribe to this newsletter are based in the Global North (although just today I saw that there are people from 67 (!!) different countries subscribed to these emails, *tear emoji*); but that’s also part of what makes it feel important to name:
There’s a distinctly American/Northern way of placing speech over action because action is precarious and speech is protected*. It’s nothing short of encouraging to witness so much of the Western public rise up and speak out against the violences of our governments. And at the same time, over the past month and a half I’ve found myself in a series of conversations with friends and acquaintances in Kenya / Djibouti / South Africa that have challenged my own internalized American perspectives on what engagement encompasses. I’m thinking of one conversation in particular with my friend in Nairobi who didn’t get the pressure to post online about Palestine. Now, were that a conversation with a friend in Brooklyn or Echo Park, I would have jumped to push back on it–emphasizing how important it is to take a stand, how every voice counts, etc. etc. Something I’ve grown mindful of over the years, though, especially when I’m back home in Kenya, is the importance of knowing when to just be quiet and take the time to hear where someone’s coming from because the lived reality they’re speaking from is distinct and deeply legitimate in its own right. And the more I spoke with this friend, the more I started to understand things I thought I knew but hadn’t actually fully internalized. Like how maybe you aren’t saying something because if you do then you won’t be able to get a visa, and if you don’t get a visa then you can’t pay your rent, and not just your rent but your parents’ rent and siblings’ rent because you’re the only one who earns in dollars. How maybe this is true for some people in America–people needing jobs to support themselves and support their families–but there, it’s true on a scale that is not remotely comparable because the federal minimum wage in America is $7.25/hr and the (commonly uninforced) minimum wage in Kenya has averaged at $46/MONTH for the past 30 years.
There’s a distinctly American/Northern way of placing speech over action because action is precarious and speech is protected*
*but even that protection is itself a façade.
These are the kinds of things I have ‘known’ for a long time – with my head. I have not known them with my body, not fully. Many of us who are dominating the ‘discourse’ on what action in the face of this genocide looks like, do not know enough of what we need to know with our bodies. That will take time. And it’s humbling to have to acknowledge that.
Even me saying this is reductive, though–I realize that. Cuz the truth is that some of the most vocal, most vehement and most rigorous outcry (aside from that of Palestinians themselves) has, in fact, come from working class people in the Global South. And every Black and Brown person in the Global North is a descendent of survival in ways that do live in the body. I don’t intend to gloss over that in any way; but rather to sit with how many things can be true at the same time.
It still feels worth saying because America dominates the algorithm. What’s posted in America, what’s demanded in America, what’s prioritized in America, is what floods the feeds of everyone else in the world. And more times than we’d like to admit, it’s missing the mark in subtle but telling ways. In ways that take certain things for granted.
“It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so—and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change.
I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths—change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not—safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope—the entire possibility—of freedom disappears. And by destruction I mean precisely the abdication by Americans of any effort really to be free.”— James Baldwin, “Down at the Cross” in The Fire Next Time (339).
The last 6 weeks have been a lot of clocking how even the tenor of American outcry is a reflection of the privileges afforded to us. A lot of clocking how my own urgency and expectation overlooks the gravity of the infinite precarities that are always unfolding for people not shielded by American passports and American dollars. And wondering what it looks like to sit in the discomfort of naming and working through the places where that contradiction lives: the wanting and willing ourselves towards solidarity, and the oversights that lead to unduly centering ourselves in the process. It’s messy! And it hurts. I celebrate the strides and I refuse to be defeated by how far there still is to go.
With Love and In Solidarity,
🤍 Neema
thank you thank you for your words! the battle for liberation is more layered than any one of us know.
❤️❤️❤️