let this radicalize you
?
Saturday April 27, 2024 15:32
@ChicagoArtistsAgainstGenocide on instagram
It took some time, but I have found my way. I've been reading Let This Radicalize You... I've been reading it very slowly, over the course of almost a year, due to brain fog and fatigue. But I've been reading it. I finally got to the chapter I knew I needed when I started, on grief and hope, and I've been taking a break since then. I attended a webinar through Northwestern University that Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes spoke at on lessons from the book. I got the workbook. I'm engaging.
I guess I don't really know how to express what I'm feeling right now. There's definitely been a switch flipped in my head after seeing the encampment demanding schools divest from their investments in the genocide in Palestine at Columbia University, on the same lawn I had a panic attack on after I put together the pieces that I was SA'd. I've had big feelings about that school that I've kept quiet. Big feelings regarding their lack of care for students, the way they try to cover their asses by removing students in mental health crises from affiliation with the school, the way they just give freshmen orientation classes on consent 101 and stress and management so that they can say they did something and deflect blame. How they buy out property in Harlem to gentrify and rebrand it as Morningside Heights. I've kept quiet out of fear for being ignored, discredited, or attacked. I was only there for a month. I was so sick that entire month. I was abandoned for a year while I was on medical leave. I tried to just forget about them.
But then we see them sic military on students for speaking up. For disrupting a violent status quo veneered with "progressiveness." For making noise about injustice.
I have always felt like I'm in a unique position to bridge things. My family are slave-descended Black Americans and part of the refugee diaspora from Laos, during the time that it became the most bombed country in history. I have ancestors who are white European immigrants and Native Americans displaced by the trail of tears. I've seen the way trauma gets held and passed on, and I've seen it's unique presentations in different groups of people from different acts of colonial violence. I've seen how it's all connected from a young age.
And then I feel like I've said this so many times lately, or at least thought it, but I am disabled and have PTSD. I have worked in mental health and used trauma-informed care. And I am stuck now because I don't think I'm an authority, I'm still managing my thoughts, and I feel like people won't listen to me... But I think we need to operate from the lens of disability justice and be trained in trauma to fully be able to ally with survivors of genocide, and I think most people are not equipped for that, and I fear we will continue the cycle of violence against them because of that and make things worse for them.
I wish people will listen to me, but I don't know how to make sure I'm heard. Part of it is definitely gaining trust. Maybe part of it is I shouldn't be operating alone, I need a community or a collective. Maybe part of it is I have been quiet too long and I need to start making noise and not stop.
I guess this is now an assessment of my causes. I think I am majorly connected to Black Americans and the Lao diaspora, and thus committed to unraveling antiBlackness, the lingering effects of slavery, and colonization. I believe in anarcho communism and community care and dream of a solarpunk future. I believe in land back, and Native-led stewardship. I believe in queering everything, and disconforming from cisheteronormativity. And I want to champion disability justice, mental health care, children's rights, and anti-genocide. Maybe those are my focuses for my art.
OK. My head hurts. I'll stop here.