Trump’s disgraceful genius has been to supply his followers with a simple—and false—account of history, to inflame their nostalgia for an imagined antiquity so as to invite its triumphant return. White nationalists have been empowered by Trump’s victory to keep rewriting in this mold, or to erase our revisions. Their falsifications are best resisted not with the substitution of one simple story for another but with the addition of contradictory details, complicating facts. It would be impossible and unwise to erase all signs of the ugliness of this country’s past; success would be a landscape lobotomy. And just as we can’t forget that our statuary reinforces the exclusions and insults of the present, so should we remember that our emerging perspective is hardly the final realization of inclusion or equality. Posterity will alter or undo our contributions and curse us for crimes we have not yet comprehended. Statues stand still; the culture moves past them.
But then, in May 2017, the four Confederate statues in New Orleans came down. New Orleans had exited the Confederacy. Many other cities and campuses followed. We have not left the Confederacy behind, but we have joined battle again.
Eight Million Ways to Belong
October 20, 2016
Dear Donald Trump,
I wonder if you have ever actually explored the New York City you claim to live in. I recommend it, because it has beauties and splendors that undermine so many of the assertions I have heard you make during your campaign, particularly in the final debate. For starters, its eight million–plus population includes a huge percentage of immigrants, Muslims, Blacks, Mexicans, and some lovely people who are Black, Muslim, and immigrant all at once. Only a third of its residents are white. You talk as if should lots of undocumented immigrants and Muslims show up here, there’ll be trouble. I have news for you: they’re here, and it seems to be working out rather well.
Do you ever come down from your tower, other than to stuff yourself into a limousine en route to a jet? You rail against immigrants, but more than a third of New York City residents are immigrants—37 percent. About five hundred thousand of its residents are undocumented, and they are some of the hardest workers making this city go. If you drove them out, the restaurant and hotel industries would collapse into crisis. Unlike you, 75 percent of undocumented New York City residents pay taxes, according to former mayor Michael Bloomberg, who also points out the low crime rate among that population. Overall, whether they’re janitors or doctors, immigrants energize and enrich this city.
You should check out Queens, the borough in which you were raised. It is now the most linguistically diverse place on earth. It’s the part of the city where most of the eight hundred languages to be found here are spoken. A lot of the languages here are vanishing tongues, as I learned from one of New York’s most enchanting organizations, the Endangered Language Alliance. People come here as refugees and they bring their culture with them. Some of the last speakers of languages from the Himalayas and the Andes are here, and they make this city a world in which many worlds fit, a conversation in which many languages belong, and a place of refuge, as it was for my mother’s grandparents when they escaped hunger and discrimination in Ireland, my father’s parents when they passed through Ellis Island, escaping the kind of pogroms you seem to be instigating.
You treat Muslims like dangerous outsiders, but you seem ignorant of the fact that the town you claim to live in has about 285 mosques, and somewhere between 400,000 and 800,000 Muslims, according to New York’s wonderful religious scholar Tony Carnes. That means one out of ten to one out of twenty New Yorkers are practitioners of the Islamic faith. A handful of Muslims—including the Orlando mass murderer, who was born in Queens—have done bad things, but when you recognize how many Muslims there are, you can stop demonizing millions for the acts of a few.
And that Orlando killer: his homophobia, easy access to guns, history of domestic violence—these are homegrown problems we need to work on, not imports. New York has also led the way in liberating gay and lesbian people from discrimination, or rather they freed themselves with campaigns, projects, sanctuary spaces, and communities that spread liberation nationwide and beyond. I just had my first drink at the Stonewall Inn in the West Village, and it was a big thrill to be there, where uprisings and resistance shifted the conversation and moved rights forward almost fifty years ago.
But we were talking about Muslims, not gay and lesbian residents, though I’m sure there are some gay Muslims to include, because everyone is here. Everyone. New York City Muslims are taxi drivers, the guys inside some of the halal food carts all over Manhattan, as well as lawyers and scholars and professors, programmers, and designers. They are fathers, toddlers, grandmothers, high-schoolers. Part of what’s so beautiful about this city is how complex the cross-categorizations are. A lot of Muslims are immigrants or children and grandchildren of immigrants, from Africa as well as Asia, but a significant percentage are African Americans, whose roots go far deeper in this country’s history than yours or mine do. Their ancestors built this place, including, literally, the wall that Wall Street is named for.
Speaking of African Americans: have you ever been to Harlem or the Bronx? You keep talking about Black people like you’ve never met any or visited any Black neighborhoods. Seriously, during the last debate you said, “Our inner cities are a disaster. You get shot walking to the store. They have no education. They have no jobs. I will do more for African Americans and Latinos than [Clinton] can ever do in ten lifetimes. All she’s done is talk to the African Americans and to the Latinos.” Dude, seriously? Did you get this sense of things from watching TV—in 1975? New York City has a 70 percent high-school graduation rate, only a bit lower than that for Black and Latinx teens, and about a 5 percent unemployment rate. And by the way, talking to people is a really great way to discover where you are and who they are. You should try it. “Inner cities” is a stale, leftover term from when cities like New York were crumbling from divestment and declining population, and crime really was high (news flash: it’s declined nationwide over the past quarter century, even though you like to harp on the hiccup in Chicago). When you talk about the “inner city,” you sound about forty years out of date.
Someday you should visit the boomtown that is New York today. Take Harlem, one of the great cultural centers of the United States, the great heart of Black culture in the United States for at least a century, the place where some of this country’s greatest writers grew up or ended up. It’s full of people with excellent jobs and educations, and to say otherwise is as ignorant as it is racist. It’s not a place riddled with crime, unless you want to call gentrification and displacement a crime—which I know you don’t, but sometimes I do, when I see how it hacks away at the cultural memory and continuity of a place and targets the vulnerable. But you and I are bound to disagree on real estate speculation, so let’s move on.
Seriously, just visit New York. It’s huge. It’s great. It is, among other things, a great Latin American city. Did you know that the most listened-to radio stations here are in Spanish? That daytime DJ Alex Sensation—a Colombian immigrant—has the top radio show in the top market in the US? His show mixes many kinds of Latin music, because New York is the Latin American capital where everyone’s shown up, from Cubans and Dominicans to Colombians to Guatemalans. In this great mix of culture, salsa music evolved and migrated outward, one of the United States’ greatest exports, along with hip-hop and rap, born in the South Bronx, now a vital part of popular culture from Inuit Canada to central Africa.
This has been a place of liberation, for the refugees who came here from all over; for the institutions that arose here, like Planned Parenthood, which you threaten to defund; for groups like Black Lives Matter, which you’ve denounced. Maybe that’s why you haven’t visited New York: it doesn’t agree with you and it undermines your ideology. There are so many New Yorks, and we all get to choose our own, but the New York of rich white people is a small slice of the city. Beyond it are a thousand New Yorks with thousands of w
ays of living and working, hundreds of languages, dozens of religions, and it all comes together every day on subway platforms, on the streets, in the parks, the hospitals, the kitchens, the public schools. Because ordinary New Yorkers get out and mix, and this coexistence with difference is the beautiful basis for a truly democratic spirit, a faith that we can trust each other and literally (and figuratively) find common ground by mingling in public.
If you’re not ready to get out and mix, here’s a very short reading assignment: read some money. Not the big stuff. Look at a dime. It says “e pluribus unum.” Out of many, one. That’s been one of this country’s key mottos since its founding. It’s realized in our cities, our great places of coexistence. Not just a tolerance of difference, but a delight in it, love for it, cross-pollination, intermarriage, hybridization, and the invention of new forms from the differences we bring with us as we come together. That’s a lot of what makes America great when it is great and not angry, divisive, unequal, and deluded. And it’s right here, all around us, in the big city.
Sincerely,
Rebecca Solnit
The Light from Standing Rock
(2016)
No one saw it coming. Suddenly, on Sunday, December 4, 2016, word went out that the US Army Corps of Engineers was withdrawing permission to build the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) under the Missouri River, just above the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. What do you do with a victory? A lot of people on social media cautioned everyone that this was not the total final Santa-is-real, everything-is-okay-forever victory, and we should not celebrate. If we waited for that, we’d never celebrate anyway. But the people most involved seemed to get it that this is a really nice chapter, not the end of the story, and you can celebrate that chapter. Which people did, with all kinds of hoopla and merriment at Standing Rock and around the world.
It is not a final victory. Donald Trump is doing his best to make sure that this and every other pipeline is built. That’s a given at this point. But it might be a really big victory.
The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis notes, in a study issued in November 2016, “The broader economic context for the project has changed radically since ETP [Energy Transfer Partners] first proposed it, in 2014. Global oil prices began to collapse just a few months after shippers committed to using DAPL, and market forecasters do not expect prices to regain 2014 levels for at least a decade. As a result, production in the Bakken Shale oil field has fallen for nearly two consecutive years.” The profit in the pipeline was to come from shippers who were locked into 2014 prices if the project was completed by January 1, 2017.
Which this gift from the US Army Corps makes quite unlikely. It’s a big blow. The report concludes, “If production continues to fall, DAPL could well become a stranded asset—one that was rushed to completion largely to protect favorable contract terms negotiated in 2014.” That’s really nice news if you’re not an investor, and news that amplifies the significance of the victory.
There’s a lot to learn from the beautiful struggle at Standing Rock, though everyone will draw their own conclusions. Mine include the importance of knowing that we don’t know what will happen next and have to live on principles, hunches, and lessons from history. Plenty of people made pronouncements about what was going to happen and what would never happen at Standing Rock that turned out to be wrong. No one saw this coming.
Another is standing up for what you believe in, even when victory seems remote to impossible. Sunday, December 4, was the pipeline victory. The next day was the sixty-first anniversary of the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. What did those African Americans living under Jim Crow hope for? Surely more than integrating the public transit system. They could not have assumed that they would help launch a movement that not only changed the nation and led to national legislation, but also offered a toolbox of nonviolent strategies and visions to the world, used in South Africa and Egypt, in Czechoslovakia and the Philippines. But they bet that the future would be different than the past and did everything to make it so. This is a moment when the civil rights movement’s victories seem to be in jeopardy—but that is all the more reason to remember that they were victories, and they were achieved in blood and pain and dedication when victory was far from sight.
And that’s another thing that matters. Consequences are often indirect. The movement at Standing Rock may yet stop a pipeline. Whether it does or not, it has brought together perhaps the greatest single gathering of Native North Americans (from Canada as well as the United States) ever, and that has been a profound and moving watershed for the growth of a transnational network of solidarity, the affirmation of cultural identities and political rights. It has demonstrated yet again that the environmental movement and human rights campaigns are often inseparable; reminded us that, worldwide, indigenous people are at the forefront of the climate movement; and that many nonnative people respect and look for leadership from these cultures. Many things we cannot foresee may come of this gathering and its vision, tactics, and power.
In this moment of right-wing and white-supremacist triumphalism, we are hearing a lot about hate crimes: beatings, insults, swastikas, threats, and more. But also rising into view is another America, with another set of beliefs, the people who stand up for racial justice, for the vulnerable, for women and LGBTQ people, for science, and for democracy. You can see it in the capital neighborhood that greeted relocating vice president Mike Pence with rainbow flags, with the defenders of the persecuted, and with the enormous desire to protect people, places, values, democracy itself. This is a turbulent moment, and in it much is possible. Standing Rock prefigured and modeled those possibilities and was radiant with this beauty.
I went to Standing Rock in early September 2016, when the weather was delightful and the landscape green. While there, I asked Dallas Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network what were the precedents for this. Sitting in the back of his minivan, as his small children milled about and the boy across the road came to shake his hand, he told me: “There’s nothing, honestly. There’s nothing that can compare. One hundred and eighty different tribal nations have sent letters of solidarity.” Goldtooth, who is Dakota and Dene, went on to describe the unprecedented support of tribes from all over the United States and Canada for this resistance, along with climate and environmental groups—a coalition with tremendous possibility for the future of both indigenous rights and the climate movement.
The joy is widespread. The first person I met when I arrived was a young Hoopa/Yurok woman from far-northern California, who told me this is the most amazing thing she’s ever been part of. The next morning, a small man came up and greeted me, introduced himself as Frank, “from right here,” a member of the Standing Rock Sioux. Somewhere in the conversation he said, “I wake up happy every day about this.” I asked him how this changed the past, thinking of the losses the Lakota/Sioux faced over the past 150 years, but he heard the question differently. He mentioned that their old enemies the Crow and the Cheyenne came to stand with them, and that the old divisions are over. When I asked that question, I was thinking about what I heard from climate activist and environmental lawyer Carolyn Raffensperger, who had spent time at the camp earlier and has a long history in the area. “There are moments in history that can heal the past and the future,” she said.
The people who persevered into the brutal winter that followed were heroic, caring more about ideals than comfort, the well-being of the river, tribal rights, and principles than personal safety. It was a noble effort in every sense, guided by prayer, committed to peace, and in it for the long run, come what may. And then came thousands of veterans to stand against the authorities and with the Indians. Then came the Army Corps of Engineers decision.
Standing Rock reminds us, finally, that we are very powerful when we come together to defend our ideals, sometimes only in indirect ways—modeling the possibilities, providing hope and moral reinforcement for what comes later or elsewhere. Sometimes in
direct ways, when we remake history.
Five centuries into the dispossession and dehumanization of Native North Americans, this moment when four thousand veterans of the US military came to stand with them, when they won something big, when the world’s eyes were turned to one of those places where crimes and depredations are too often invisible: it mattered. As it did when the veterans formally apologized for the depredations of the US Army and asked for forgiveness. And on December 4, the people there and those protesting in banks, writing letters, sending donations, organizing marches around the country, won something worth celebrating. We are facing a lot of trouble on all fronts. Standing Rock reminds us to come together and stand up to it.
IV.
Possibilities
Break the Story
(2016)5
“Break the story” is a line journalists use to mean getting a scoop, being the first to tell something, but for me the term has deeper resonance. When you report on any event, no matter how large or small—a presidential election, a school board meeting—you are supposed to come back with a story about what just happened. But, of course, stories surround us like air; we breathe them in, we breathe them out. The art of being fully conscious in personal life means seeing the stories and becoming their teller, rather than letting them be the unseen forces that tell you what to do. Being a public storyteller requires the same skills with larger consequences and responsibilities, because your story becomes part of that water, undermining or reinforcing the existing stories. Your job is to report on the story on the surface, the contained story, the one that happened yesterday. It’s also to see and sometimes to break open or break apart the ambient stories, the stories that are already written, and to understand the relationship between the two.
Call Them by Their True Names Page 13