choice, offers little and instead creates gridlock and dysfunction. This dysfunction is used to justify neoliberal restructuring and downsizing and yet nurtures rebellion at the same time. Maybe this is the singular moment that inadvertently exposes both the function and dys-function of white supremacy in capitalist patriarchy. It is not unimportant that Trump follows our first Black president, even if Obama was no radical on racial issues.
In this critical time, Trump and his regime attempt to prop up misogynoir for the ailing capitalism they love so dearly. They cling to a misogyny that emboldens white supremacy, oblivious to its anachronisms and violence. Trump uses multiple hatreds and animus, thinking he can bulldoze an economic recovery into being. He bellows forth a cacophonous call to arms. I hope that he will assist in his own destruction. But this cannot happen on its own. It is crucial that the resistance stay simultaneously mobilized and disruptive, multipurposed and unified.
Trump speedily executed executive orders and decrees when he came into office, reinstating the global gag rule, disallowing even the mention of abortion to all the women of color across the globe, supporting settler colonialism by reissuing access rights to the Dakota Access and Keystone Pipelines, making full-blown enemies where they did not previously exist of immigrants and refugees, especially those from Muslim countries.
Huge acts of resistance filled airports throughout the country as Muslim travelers were detained and refused entry. Mass protests greeted Trump’s disavowal and dismembering of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). As well, his anti-immigration zero tolerance policy, separating and detaining young children from their parents, mobilized new segments of activists.
A majority of whites did not support the thuggery of Charlottesville, although Trump did. Trump tweeted that football players who #TakeAKnee should be fired. He called them sons of bitches. He then antagonized not only the NFL, but the NBA also, condemning as unpatriotic anyone who did not stand for the national anthem and the flag.
Colin Kaepernick took a knee to make a statement against police brutality and racist injustice. Trump insisted that his own remarks had nothing to do with racism and were about patriotism. It is lost on Trump that the anthem, the nation, and patriotism are mired in a history of racism.
At this point, more and more players are kneeling with Kaepernick and speaking out against Trump. I am hoping that the mobilization continues even though team owners will be fined if players do not stand for the anthem. I also hope that a more sustained critique of structural racism will develop further. And back to the mothers who Trump says are the bitches. Yet the NFL is mired in numerous allegations of domestic abuse by its players, and the physical brutality of the sport with its horrific head injuries is hardly a location of people’s liberation. Nevertheless, there are important sites of resistance from within.
How can these reform movements become revolutionary? Is it possible that because the problem of racist heteropatriarchal capitalism is interlocking, assaults aimed at a single site can disarm and weaken the entire foundation? There may not be a woman president at present, but there are many women leading the resistance in its many forms. Much of the radicalization surrounding electoral politics can morph into unknowable achievements, as demonstrated in the 2018 midterm elections.
If focusing on a part may destabilize the whole, this may mean that the relationship between reform and revolution is redefined as more of an integral process rather than separate and in contradiction. If there is not a single mode of production to attack, but multiple sites that protect the interlocking structure of racist capitalist patriarchy, do reformist politics become a revolutionary possibility? Contemplate with me the demands for single-payer health care, an end to racist policing, and full access to abortion, contraception, and reproductive justice, and imagine how they might help move along the revolutionary process that has already begun.
New questions that need to guide the work are: Is capital so malleable that it is able to absorb modernized systems of gendered racism? Is misogyny so malleable that it can still oppress most women while allowing others to hold positions of power? Can white supremacist capitalist patriarchy withstand substantial racial redefinition and still deliver the necessary exploitative systems? Can white supremacy have Black men and women ruling? The massively popular film Black Panther comes to mind. Can Blacks rule a Wakanda in the real world? Can Black women warriors bring the peace that we wish for or will the powers that be regroup to prevent such a world?
Capitalism needs more than an update. It needs more than a modernization that would bring multiple and diverse people to positions of power. Rather, it needs every kind of reform leading to and demanding revolution.
Because the problem abolitionists face is complex and multiple, questions that center on capitalism and sideline its white privilege and misogyny are, more than ever, insufficient. The predator-in-chief has made clear for all to see that misogyny (he will grab our pussies if he wants to) and whiteness (his base is white and he will throw everyone else under the bus) are key to saving capitalism.
Just maybe, global capitalist greed is undermining its golden rule. Instead of protecting and occluding the racist heteropatriarchal underbelly of capitalism, Trump upends it by exposing the usually well-kept secret that capital couldn’t do much of what it does if it didn’t use patriarchy and its deep roots/routes of modernized settler colonialism and chattel slavery to garner its profits.
So it is no surprise that Trump claims to defend white working-class men and promises them their jobs back. But it continues to amaze me that this is never described as identity politics. The putdown of identity politics is usually reserved for people of color and white women. Only those who criticize the racist, sexist, heterogendered, able-bodied, unfair structuring of citizenship and political life are categorized as indulging in identity politics.
But those of us critiquing the system are paving a new path. Audre Lorde pointed to the master’s tools and the master’s house, suggesting that they cannot resolve our dilemmas. Rosa Luxemburg understood that revolution cannot be bounded by limited imagination. Let some of us in the resistance call out the failed two-party system. Let many wonder about a third party if they must. Let some call for an end to nationalism and US exceptionalism and the wars necessitated by it. Let others demand an end to climate catastrophe and the destruction of the planet. Let still others imagine a whole new structural apparatus for communities living in a borderless global world.
Following Audre and Rosa, abolitionists need to dream beyond what feels like possibility. We need to mobilize our different movements of many distinct voices into a risk-taking set of coordinated actions. It is for those of us, especially privileged white people, to listen carefully and put our bodies on the line wherever they are needed, between the police and their militarized actions, and alongside our brothers and sisters of color in everyday life.
So feminists need to be and can be simultaneously diverse and unified and multipronged in our visions. Alicia Garza of Black Lives Matter says that the time to act is now, so embrace whoever is ready in this moment. Those of us who are antiracist can unite for the planet and our bodies against Trumpism and its cabal of violators and predators. S/exploitation is key to this system and must be destroyed along with its racial practice of domi/nation.
There are new possibilities to resist, as global capital has demanded the mobility of labor, threading many sites of colonial power, from Europe to the United States, creating a new majority/minority white status. Whiteness is exposed as a minority global characteristic more readily than before, now that the once predominantly white United States struggles to live its supremacist lie at home. And now that countries like France and Germany can no longer spin their white majority standing as one and the same with supremacy. White people have always been a minority in Africa, Asia, and South America. This will soon also be true in the United States and Europe, although as the white apartheid rule in South Africa showed, minorities can and do seize power.
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