Tropical Storm Sara

 Tropical Storm Sara didn't get much attention in the United States. It was a weather story, with headlines like "Storm Weakens," and illustrations like satellite photos of its extent. The 110,000 Hondurans cut off from roads by flooding weren't mentioned or pictured. I suppose if any homeless Hondurans feel compelled to flee north we will hear all about them, transformed on FOX News from climate refugees into an invading army.

And make no mistake. This isn't a weather story, it is a climate story. In September, we heard all about the horror of Hurricane Helene. In part that was because it was a stronger storm. In larger part that was because it hurt white Americans. Scientists who study such things are clear that climate change made Helene more damaging than it would have been without a 2°+ increase(!) in ocean temperature. Our storms have become both stronger and more frequent.

But there has been a profound disconnect between our concern for the victims of these storms (at least the victims in the US) and our concern about the climate crisis. President-elect Trump says the climate crisis is a "scam" and is promising more drilling for fossil fuels. His appointee for Energy Secretary calls the climate crisis a "hoax" and says that fossil fuels will restore American dominance. He also promises to uplift women in the former colonial world by "giving" them natural gas so they won't have to walk all day in search of firewood.

I won't say too much about the incoming secretary of the interior, because as governor of the North Dakota petrostate he gave lip service to the climate crisis as an actual phenomenon, promising to make the state carbon neutral. We'll see. He has actual experience as a public servant so he may not fall into the category of woefully under qualified clowns whose recommendations for high office are their personal loyalty to DJT and their incompetence. Perhaps he belongs in the other category of Trump appointees: ambitious, serious, and doomed to be fired soon.

The UN's climate summit is meeting in Baku right now. Azerbaijan is another petrostate. It has been polluting the Caspian Sea since its land-based oilfields dried up and the industry shifted to offshore wells, which makes it a strange choice. On the other hand, the UN has been holding these meetings for thirty years without making any impact on the problem, so...

I have been trying since the election to focus on positive signs of actual resistance (as opposed to Democratic Party pretense.) I have been trying to discourage the divisive finger-pointing that can make it impossible for us to raise any united front against fascism and racial capitalism. But this morning all I can see is a system that is determined to murder us all, led by enthusiastic profiteers who somehow imagine that they will be immune to the destruction.

I am hopeful that putting this dread into words will enable me to move on and return to planning our answer.

Okay. Here's a postmortem.

 I have been avoiding the election postmortems. I don't think the handwringing and the fingerpointing are going to help us organize against racist and fascist atrocity. 

I keep seeing white pundits (and grass-roots white liberals, too) who are just astonished that Black and Latino voters "shifted" to Trump, as if our own white relatives and neighbors didn't cast enough ballots already to win victory for xenophophia, misogyny, white supremacy, homophobia, and an end to the Constitution. They really seem to be believe that the Society of Magical Negroes has an obligation to save us white people from the logic of our own privilege.

I also keep seeing Latino friends yelling at other Latinos that when the white supremacist mob says "Illegal!" they're not talking about immigration status; they mean every person of Latin American origin. I see Black friends yelling at other Black people that DJT's racism doesn't stop at Brown people. And - of course - I see Black friends who are endlessly enraged at Boricuas and Dominicanos who truly believe that they are white... and voted that way.

I have written publicly that I don't think dwelling on any of this is helpful. But I will take a few moments for a closer look by examining one particular Election District here in the Bronx. It's just a few blocks where a lot of my close friends live. I have spent a lot of time in their homes. I have attended a lot of parties in the basements of their buildings, celebrating milestones in their lives and the lives of their children.

This Election District coincides closely with a census tract, so I can look at demographic as well as voting data. 68% of the people are what the US Census calls "Hispanic." I'll say, based on my observation that they're mostly Dominican and Puerto Rico. The Census says 24% of the people are Black. Only 1% of the people in this tract are white.

It's a comparatively poor district, too, although I don't know anybody there who admits to being poor. 36% are listed by the Census as below the poverty line, which is more than twice the New York City average. I will add, for the benefit of those who haven't studied this question: most economists agree that people earning double the official "poverty line" are still poor. That means that the Census Bureau's poverty numbers are dramatically understated. And that is nation wide. New York City is more expensive than most places. 26% of the children in the district live in Census-defined "poverty." So do half of the seniors over 65.

So how do these people vote?

The official tallies for the 2020 election show that 93% of the people in this small Election District voted for Biden and 7% for Trump. Those are truly astonishing numbers, overwhelming, in fact. And they conform rather closely with previous elections. So it is definitely noteworthy that the (still unofficial) tallies for this week show a shift: On Tuesday, Kamala Harris received 74% of the vote in these blocks, while DJT got 26%. That is a 19-percentage point shift, and that is a lot.

Harris still won an overwhelming majority in the district, in the borough, and in the city. But it means that an awful lot of people on those streets and in those buildings are looking around wide-eyed at their neighbors and asking, "What the fuck are you thinking? How could you possibly vote for a man who says - loudly and daily - that he hates us? When he says he has day-one plans to deport you and me, do you think he's talking about someone else?"

I'll say these things: 

• Even DJT himself doesn't seem to understand how tariffs work so it's a little hard for me to get angry at people who never had a college economics course and believe what he says about that.
• Male supremacy and its corollary - rape culture - haven't really gone away. That didn't just make it hard for lots of men (and women, too!) to vote for Kamala Harris. It also made it easier for them to look at a weak, blustering, misogynist and see him as the imaginary tough guy he thinks he is.
• We saw in his first campaign that a lie, repeated often enough, establishes itself as a kind of alternate truth. And his lies never let up: about the economy, about immigrant "armies" seizing towns and eating pets, about emergency hurricane relief... do I need to go on?
• I will add that white-supremacist thinking is a drug, along with great nation chauvinism. White people aren't the only ones who are susceptible. How often have I noted that the first thing new immigrants to this country want to do is close the door behind them?

These things are all true. But as I said at the outset, they should not distract us too much. We should certainly not let them divide us. In this one little microcosm I have been looking at, DJT only fooled one-quarter of the people. The other three quarters were unmoved by his bullshit. That is no small thing. If we are going to beat back fascism we have to begin by uniting with the people around us who see the truth. We ourselves would be fools to reject unity because someone in their family or someone of their ethnicity fell for DJT's propaganda. And beating back fascism is only a start. If we hope to defeat racial capitalism itself, we're going to have to win over those people who did fall for the lies. Berating them today as weak-minded and treasonous may satisfy our anger and disappointment, but I don't see how it helps us in the long run. Laughing at them when they themselves get deported may feel like justice, but I don't see how it helps us convince them to join us.

We are related

 We have all been trained to use the phrase “the Economy” without a great deal of thought, often capitalized as if it were a person… or perhaps a god. During this election cycle it has been shorthand for prices.

Sharp observers have noted that price gouging - not inflation - has been responsible for much of the increase in prices at supermarkets, at gas pumps, and in housing. And it is worth noting that price gouging has been very helpful to some indicators of “the economy,” among them the stock market.

But “the economy” is an abstraction for certain kinds of human relationships: 

The economy is the relationship between you and the Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Indians, and Nepalis who work for Classic Fashion in the Kingdom of Jordan making your Calvin Kleins, your Reeboks and Adidas, your Haynes and Under Armour.

The economy is the relationship between you and the farmworkers in Michoacan who grow and harvest the strawberries you eat in the winter.

The economy is the relationship between you and the Mexicans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Africans who slaughter, butcher, and pack the beef and pork you eat.

It is also the relationship between you and the Mayan eight-year old selling candy on the subway because a European bank flooded her family’s farm and home to build an unnecessary hydroelectric dam so it could market carbon credits.

It is also the relationship between you and the Venezuelan accountant who delivered your Uber Eats on a rented scooter because the United States is starving his family in Caracas as a punishment for voting for Hugo Chavez in 1998.

And it is the relationship between you and the Haitian home health care aide who is here taking care of your grandpa because Haiti has been impoverished by repeated invasions from the United States, largely as a punishment for being a Black country that freed itself from slavery and colonialism. 

None of us know more than a handful of these people personally. In 1840 the essayist Thomas Carlyle said that all our relationships were being reduced to an impersonal cash nexus, meaning that “the Economy” strips our relationships of all their human dimensions but one. In that respect you could say that it is a kind of pornography, eliminating any conversation, care, or affection. 

Some will argue that we have gained from being in economic relationship with so many people around the world, and that we cannot possibly know all of them. The argument is that our lives would be impoverished if we could only trade for food and clothing and services with people in our immediate area and our immediate circle. We certainly couldn’t have strawberries in the winter. We certainly would own fewer clothes. What we have definitely lost is kinship.

The erasure of kinship was an essential feature of early capitalist development. And I don’t just mean our loss of human ties with our neighbors. Turning human beings into commodities couldn’t be done without denying Black moms' kinship with their own children. Black children could only become transferable commodities - available for sale or as security for loans - if capitalist custom and law denied their kinship with their moms. And not only moms, but dads, too, - even white dads - were denied kinship with their own children. Racial capitalism was so committed to turning Black people into magically-profitable investments that the children of  Black women (including the children of Black women and white men) were also permanently enslaved, often the transferable property of their own fathers. Saidiya Hartman has said of this commodification of children that the woman’s birth canal was turned into another Middle Passage. I do not know any stronger example of how the capitalist economy works to dehumanize us and to erase our kinship with one another. 

This week it has been about Puerto Ricans. And why do the heralds of racial capitalism have a particular hatred for Puerto Ricans? 

It is precisely because they are US citizens and cannot be marginalized and disfranchised by immigration law. 

Understand: capitalism doesn’t want to bar Haitians, or Dominicans, or Salvadorans, or Guatemalans. Capitalism relies on them and on their labor.

Capitalism doesn’t hate undocumented immigrants because they are here without papers. Racial capitalism loves workers with no rights. Racial capitalism cannot function without such workers. It doesn’t matter whether they are here in the United States working in agriculture and food processing or they are overseas producing our clothing. 

And if you have been feeling economically diminished, well, that is the way capitalism works. It dehumanizes some “other,” often with your enthusiastic cooperation and approval, and then it does the same to you.

I am blessed beyond measure by the surprising number of you who have adopted me as a brother, as a father, as a grandfather. It humbles me. Our kinship enriches my life.

I just ask that you also consider our kinship with that eight-year old selling candy on the subway. I ask that you remember our kinship with that Venezuelan accountant delivering your takeout. I ask that you honor our kinship with the Haitian lady caring for your grandpa.

We are related.