Christmas Eve

remembering to resist logics of dehumanization

Snow is hurriedly and then lazily dancing around the bars of my fire escape just beyond my cold weary succulent. I stare out trying to summon words for the quality of movement, thinking back to the language of a dance class my dear friend Cora teaches and find myself shifting in bed. I look down to see a group bundled in pink and red coats making tracks toward Broadway. I love the snow. I could stare at it for hours, I love the crunch under my boots, I love knowing that the wool socks my grandmother sends me every year will keep my toes warm for hours.

I grew up only having to shovel snow when visiting cousins; I spent college in an idyllic town where I could watch flakes lilting from the fully insulated but still romantically shaped windows of a tower; and I now live in a city that plows the streets in an apartment with radiator heating. All this to say I’ve never been subjected to cruelties of winter (aside from a few black ice events which made me grateful for the mandatory falling classes at clown camp) and yet, my second thought when it snows and when it starts to really feel like winter (it was 10 degrees F yesterday) is fear.

It’s snowing Christmas Eve and the libraries will all be closed tomorrow for the holiday which means hundreds fewer warming centers to protect vulnerable people from the cold and wet streets. The reliable places will be closed, and any temporary set-ups are incredibly hard to find online.

Folks often seek shelter from the elements in the subways, because they are some of the very few reliably open spaces. And yet, a man from Long Island (I find this piece of bio extremely relevant) has just been acquitted of murdering a man down and out on his luck on the subway. I have been on the subway hundreds of times with individuals, like the deceased Neely, who have expressed their terror, frustration, discomfort, rage, disbelief at the conditions that they face. Rarely have I ever felt in danger, even when someone has yelled their frustration splittingly in my face. The fact about public transportation is it is in fact public. There is a certain 6^th sense for danger that you develop living in the city for long enough, who it is a good idea to make eye contact and smile to and whose gaze it would be best to avoid etc… This sense requires actual thought and experience, it requires being aware of the circumstances of people, knowing that people do not just randomly yell their frustration, it requires perhaps having had a day so bad you feel like you yourself could yell in the subway and knowing that a person without shelter has had days 1000x harder. Everyone who rides the subway knows that the person yelling isn’t the dangerous person, they are most often a victim as we saw with the murderous Long Islander.

“To dehumanize another human being is not merely to declare that someone is not human, and it does not happen by accident. It is a process, a programming. It takes energy and reinforcement to deny what is self-evident in another member of one's own species.”
― Isabel Wilkerson

I think the fear that people feel in witnessing someone signal their distress publicly is actually that we are being made aware of what so many people desperately seek to avoid; that the system is set up to hurt a lot of people while it makes other disgustingly wealthy. People are afraid to see the outcomes of the system, they wish not to witness it so that they can go on soothing their own anxieties through consumption. Folks rarely want to confront our individual (and often collective) impotence in the face of these systems, let alone the knowledge that most of us are one injury, disability, medical bill away from destitution.

Earlier this year police shot into a crowded subway murdering a man over evading the $2.75 fare. Even more brutally, a few days ago a man set a sleeping woman on fire on the F train. Her murderer and many many bystanders (including a cop) watched without intervening to save her life.

My experience of New York has not been marked by witnessing such tremendous communal neglect, such disgust at the suffering of others. In fact, one of the things I’ve loved about living in New York City is the sense of community. Strangers looking out for strangers, certainly neighbors (sometimes too nosily) keeping an eye and an ear out. The doormen who say hi to me at the beginnings and ends of my walk back to the West Side late at night from work on the East side. The regulars at my bar who show me pictures of their children or dogs or play jeopardy with me to keep me sharp while I sling Chablis and a million espresso martinis late on a Friday. I have found a tremendous amount of kindness in this city. Which isn’t to say that I haven’t had my fair share (some might argue more than fair) of intense events, but those have never been the things that have turned me off this city – people entering the subway before anyone can get off and walking through Rockefeller center filled with tourists who have no spatial awareness are a different story.

People here may not always be nice about it, but they will generally help you out, the kind of people who will tell you if you have something on your face. It may sting a bit to hear you are taking a selfie in a “stupid fucking place, like a goddamn idiot” but it could save you getting run over by a horse later. I have only been here for 6 years, and I’ve heard from wiser sources that this sort of “look out for your neighbor” attitude has always been around, some say it changed after 9/11, that people became softer and say hello more, try to find the sweetness in each interaction. This would make sense to me though I am not old enough or long enough lived in this city to determine the veracity of these claims. I have however lived here throughout an ongoing pandemic and have worked in public facing service industry positions for most of my time in this city. So, you could say I have noticed some shifts.

“Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.”
― Audre Lorde

I am not sure how to express that all these events are connected, that the state apparatus of violence, the acquittal of Neely’s murderer, and the ambivalence of onlookers during a brutal murder are all a part of a trend of dehumanization and othering that is a direct symptom of rising fascism which has been helped along through the abandonment of public health measures while people are disabled and debilitated in an ongoing pandemic and an active genocide which we have been witnessing through our phones for over year. There are several readily available examples of this growing fascism a few of which I have already shown, but the laundering of state violence through the media apparatus I find incredibly disturbing. One of the most obvious egregious is the Atlantic printing the sentence “It is possible to kill children legally,” which has been defended by its context to an absurd degree. Who might defend such a thing? Possibly you, if you aren’t thinking too much (which would be easy given all the distraction and shades of propaganda we are being fed constantly).

There are times when I feel like a conspiracist saying, “but don’t you see! it’s all connected!” Thankfully, there are some historical precedents to my assertions uncomfortable as they may be. The 1918 pandemic left many people destitute, disabled, and dehumanized. This dehumanization of disabled people allowed the Nazi party to directly target them without too much fuss, beginning the holocaust. Dehumanization of vulnerable and disabled people is a tool of fascism (this includes people made vulnerable through any political efforts including racialization, poverty, anti-trans rhetoric and violence etc…). The normalization of dehumanizing rhetoric (and actions), which is so violently defended with fear as its basis should be combatted at every level. Of course, it’s important to fight dehumanization on a political level, but we also have the obligation to do so internally and interpersonally. We have to be open to hearing from our friends and loved ones that a position we may fully defend and believe in might actually be rooted in propagandistic fear and we might be unwittingly participate in dehumanization, we mustn’t fear confronting our own indoctrination because the worst thing we could do would be to stay stagnant, stay complicit. WE cannot save ourselves or one another by shoving our heads in the sand (or in the endless stream of pithy “content” no matter how much I love scrolling twitter).

Watch out because dehumanization and distraction are everywhere. Even writing this I felt the urge to give some sort of cheery holiday message lest you stop reading. Any time I bring up what might be considered a difficult subject, but is in fact just reality, I notice people turn away and I feel the desire to maintain connection, so I often go quiet. Or friends in new company might laugh off my vociferous opinions as a quirk so as not to “bring down the vibe.” I wonder that it is so frightening to look at reality, and I am concerned that people feel they will not be able to have joy if they experience or witness pain.

I feel the fight in my own mind worrying that through describing these events and their connections (albeit ineloquently) I am alienating you my dear reader and friend. But there is a bee in my bonnet and a tremendous amount of hope in my heart that we together are capable of holding very hard things, and joy, and the energy for the struggle against fascism together. Because we have to witness the horrors in order to know how and what to change and then we have to dance and to laugh during the revolution.

Read a good book of theory. Read about community. Hangout with your community. Confront the propaganda when you see it or even when you somewhat suspect something that smells faintly of dehumanization, even if you just practice flagging it in your own mind. Be kind to people on the subway (bring packs of socks or water bottles or protein bars with you to hand out. Yes, also give people cash). Talk to your family, talk to your friends, for sure talk to your therapist. And if you’re really desperate for an interlocutor, talk to me.

Okay now I’m off to make some persimmon syrup for mezcal sour. Happy snowy Christmas Eve!

“There is always something to do. There are hungry people to feed, naked people to clothe, sick people to comfort and make well. And while I don't expect you to save the world I do think it's not asking too much for you to love those with whom you sleep, share the happiness of those whom you call friend, engage those among you who are visionary and remove from your life those who offer you depression, despair and disrespect.”

― Nikki Giovanni

Here is Walter pondering why he isn’t being given cheese: