‘Language is never neutral. Language is always political.’
2020, what a year. It was one that certainly cast a spotlight on a lot of social, economic a‘Language is never neutral. Language is always political.’
2020, what a year. It was one that certainly cast a spotlight on a lot of social, economic and political issues, injustices and failings, ones Marc Lamont Hill expertly analyzes and addresses in the essays and interviews within We Still Here. While it may be painful to relive some of these moments and much of the individual subject matter will be familiar from Twitter threads and Instagram infographics during the summer, Hill brilliantly distills a vast array of topics from the pandemic and the socio-economic effects to the Black Lives Matter movement and the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor that lead to the protests over the summer, and shows how the American headline news is all part of larger systemic issues. Done through conversation with Frank Barat (and including an extraordinary forward by the amazing Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor), Hill’s analysis and insights make this a crucial work of anti-racism and social criticism surrounding the events of 2020 that takes an academic approach while delivering in an accessible manner.
Published in November, 2020 there may be apprehension that this book is still too close to the ongoing issues and struggles addressed in the book, but something I found most impressive was the clear and concise ways Hill is able to speak on the topics--ones we’ve all been currently reading about--and finding such incisive insights while finding key connections. There is a lot going on here and many of the ideas cross over between each chapter, but I’d like to take a look at a few of his key topics. This was a year where, in Hill’s words:
‘too many Americans had shown little regard for what was needed from every single one of us: to make our own selves uncomfortable in order to ensure another’s life...a high-stakes call to become Martin Luther King;s ‘beloved community’
There is a lengthy discussion on how the pandemic exponentially harmed already marginalized communities. ‘Your proximity to death makes you disposable,’ he says ‘your disposability makes you exploitable.’ He discusses how this has affected communities of color and especially those already without adequate housing. Hospitals in under-resourced areas also bore an extra weight, being overrun without adequate safeguards, with staff often making and reusing their own PPE in the early months. The chapter Death Eligible addresses concerns with prisons, both from the pandemic aspects with high infection rates where 'the incarcerated were used to make masks and hand sanitizer that they were not allowed to use, while they got sick,' but also as a continuing conversation from ideas expressed by abolitionists such as Angela Y. Davis. You lived it, you’ve seen the articles, but Hill condolences it all into a very pointed argument that is very effective.
The economic conditions are particularly enlightening through Hill’s discourse on the pandemic. He focuses on the way it will likely lead to growing inequality. ‘The June 2020 Global Economic Prospects Report shows that the pandemic could push 71 million people into extreme poverty’ and ‘the overwhelming majority of the new poor will be concentrated in already vulnerable areas.’ Much of this he terms under the concept of ‘Corona Capitalism’ which is, in effect, very similar to the warnings of what Naomi Klein refers to as the ‘shock doctrine’, or how the powerful exploit disasters or times of uncertainty for profit and ramming through neoliberal policy (this is best examined in her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism). Hill lays out a definition of his variant, Corona Capitalism:
‘Corona capitalism refers to the economic conditions and institutional arrangements that made the vulnerable more likely to experience premature death during the Covid-19 pandemic. Corona capitalism also speaks to the ways that human crises are exploited by the powerful, who coordinate with governments to create policies that enable them to profit during such moments...it describes how centuries of racial capitalism and decades of neoliberal economic policy not only created the conditions for the Covid-19 pandemic but also informed our legal, economic, medical, ecological, cultural, and social responses to it.’
Through this lens he critiques the roll-out of PPP (my own House Rep, Bill Huizenga, took in near a $million in PPP then fired his employees anyways), stimulus checks, and puts a specific focus on companies such as Amazon that made massive profits during this time. He argues that while Amazon did not do anything that was illegal, it highlights the ways government picks winners and losers and legislates to the whims of the already-powerful.
‘The conundrum in many ways represents what it means to be Black in America: In what way am I going to resist death today?’
Most of the book, however, is focused on the summer protests and the growing Black Lives Matter movement. He argues that these protests should never be called riots, as riot implies random occurrences and chaos whereas the movement centered around organized ideas and demonstrations and states that ‘rebellion’ would be a better term (this was a new discourse to me that I found interesting) because ‘it spotlights organized resistance by the oppressed against the systems that dominate them.’ He also draws a line between the discomfort and loss of faith in the system during the pandemic to the uprisings that were sparked by the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor as well as Amy Cooper making false claims to the police on bird-watcher Christian Cooper. It was an amalgamation of grievances and injustices that made them inevitable, he argues, and not a singular event.
‘Black Feminism is the political, intellectual, and moral anchor of our freedom struggle.’
He has a particularly interesting discussion on intersectionality and the importance of listening to Black Feminists and how ‘we have always measured Black pain by its impact on Black men.’ Breonna Taylor, from Grand Rapids, Mi right next to me, comes up here, as her murder barely registered in the public eye until months later during the summer rebellion. He says this is in part due to the lack of footage, ‘as the spectacle of violence is so often a critical element’ he says in criticism of the public fetishization of seeing violence in order to acknowledge it, but also due to her being a Black woman. In the chapter Justice for “All” he argues in favor of using the phrase All Black Lives Matter to ensure ‘our humanity does not hinge on our social acceptability, respectability, or proximity to power’ and to hold space for the most marginalized as well, particularly Black women and trans women who are more often impacted.
This leads into ideas on how justice should be had for all, and that even those who have committed a crime do not deserve to be killed. Ta-Nehisi Coates once wrote that a police officer should not be judge, jury and executioner, and Hill argues as follows:
’We can have moral critiques of the neighborhood drug dealer, the person who robs houses, or someone incarcerated for a violent crime. These critiques cannon, however, lead us to ignore injustices against those who do hard within our communities. Such a position yields the lives of those we deem ‘bad people’ to the violence of the state. It also denies the possibility of healing, redemption, and transformation. Instead, we must create mechanisms for holding individuals accountable for their actions while asserting their fundamental right to love, investment, and protection.’
In multiple essays he addresses the notion of State Violence and how the State seems to have a monopoly on the ability to enact violence. He analyzes Martin Luther Kings statements on non-violence and states that ‘King’s effectiveness as a nonviolent leader hinged on the presence of actual violence.’ ‘Empires have always maintained their power through violence,’ he says, continuing in the chapter Language of the Unheard as follows:
’Even as we applaud King for his discipline and moral maturity, as well as his political acumen, it is wholly unreasonable to demand unconditional nonviolence from all oppressed people. The moral authority of the oppressed cannot be conditioned on their commitment to using their own bodies as a ransom for liberation. To do so is to normalize the violence of the oppressor.’
Hill fears that insistances on nonviolence normalize the notion that only the State can activate violence and use it as a tool. While he does not advocate for violence, it is an interesting point to consider, particularly when compounded with his analysis of the way ‘cultural practices do not merely encourage us to valorize the police. They also prepare us to perpetually grant police the benefit of the doubt...they compel us to justify police misconduct as a necessary evil.’ This section is particularly interesting and dives into cultural normalizations of police and the ways media has presented them over generations.
Police killings also makes a large portion of his statements, as that was the crux of the issue this summer. The way he frames it, though, I found quite effective:
’The story of US police violence is not ‘sometimes violent police kill us.’ The more accurate narrative is ‘US policing is a violent institution that uses illegal and excessive force against its most vulnerable citizens routinely. SOmetimes, in the process of engaging in ritual violence against us, they also kill us.’
This seems something to consider, especially as so much online discourse battles over the effectiveness of slogans and framing and how the phrase ‘defund the police’ supposedly turned people off because it was too complex an idea to be embodied in a catch phrase.
‘We must struggle to create a world where harm is met with restoration, justice is not confused with punishment, and safety is not measured by the number of human beings we imprison.’
There is so much to talk about here, but you get the idea and I think it would be better served actually reading Hill’s words in full. He does a phenomenal job distilling a wide variety of topics and showing their interconnectedness, while finding the pulse of the issues of 2020 and examining them in highly efficient and effective ways. It helps to have a bit of prior-knowledge going into a few sections but the discussions are beneficial for those still new to the ideas as well as those continue to grapple with them. Often works like this face the criticism that they emphasize problems but never solutions, though Hill addresses this in passing at a few points arguing that until we have these conversations and acknowledge these issues in full, we can never hope to correct them. May this book be another step in the way to looking these issues in the face and standing tall to find a better way.
4.5/5
‘The challenge before us is to never relent. WE cannot let our mission be coopted. We cannot reduce our radical vision to a reformist strategy. We cannot concede our right to reparations. We cannot settle for nicer occupiers or warmer cages. We cannot scale down our dreams. We cannot give up. We Still Here. Until victory. Always.’...more
s.penkevich
>
Books:
blm
(1)
