No, we are not all in the same boat

 Judith is not the only Black woman I know who finally couldn't keep watching "A Handmaid's Tale" on TV. The reminders of their great-grandmothers' experiences, the notion that this all becomes a horror because it's happening to white women, the belief that this is speculative fiction instead of fact... it was all too much. The use of the red, hooded cloaks as a public trope made it more than just a show to stop watching. Protests against Trump's inauguration, against misogynist Supreme Court nominees, and finally against the Court's long-prepared blow against women's bodily autonomy in Dobbs v. Mississippi all featured demonstrators in those cloaks. The implication that this represents a frightening future instead of a horrifying past is a kind of color blindness that erases the historical memory of Black and Native women and presents white experience as universal instead of particular.

There are parallels all over the landscape of political issues in the US. Every time a white person responds to the latest horror with an indignant "This is not who we are!" Black people roll their eyes and say "This is who you always were." An attempted insurrection and coup at the US Capitol in 2021? A successful murderous insurrection and coup in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898. Separating parents from their children at the border? The entire history of Native boarding schools and the present practices of child welfare agencies with Black families. Mass shootings of Mexican and Mexican Americans in El Paso and African Americans in Buffalo? Do I even need to say anything?

I was caught off guard by discussions of a post-apocalyptic novel by Rebecca Roanhorse. She made the point that Native people are already living in post-apocalyptic times, something that I had failed up until that moment to fully register. Similarly, Black, Native, and other colonized American peoples have already experienced fascism. Way back in 1946, when most people in the US were still freshly horrified by the full exposure of the extremes of the Nazi holocaust, WEB DuBois wrote in The World and Africa:

There was no Nazi atrocity - concentration camps, wholesale maiming and murder, defilement of women and ghastly blasphemy of childhood - which the Christian civilization of Europe had not long been practicing against colored folk in all parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world.

This is actually the meaning of the descriptor "racial capitalism." It isn't a "flavor" of capitalism, like mercantile or monopoly. It is essential to exploitation to target a group that the exploiter can dismiss as somehow lesser, somehow less deserving to be treated as kin or even as human. But the dirty secret is that whatever a capitalist tries against another color or nationality or religion will - sooner than later - be extended against people whose only real difference is less money.

White people often object to discussion of difference. They may say that it weakens unity. But imagine how hard it must be to find unity with people who refuse even to acknowledge your lived experience.