A Letter to Friends and Relatives about Race, Justice, and the Election of Donald Trump

Dear Friends and Relatives,

This fall afternoon, I wanted to clarify my view on the relationship between race in America and the election of Donald Trump. There have emerged tensions throughout our country and these tensions have even emerged between us. Some have reached out, others haven't. These tensions, hidden and unhidden, must be reckoned with. So let us begin... First, I think it is important and crucial that people speak, write, express and act on their political thoughts and feelings in spite of the tensions.

At its core, politics is our relationship to power and government. There are proposals from the President Elect Trump website that promise to toughen on immigration and crime: for many, he means it: and for those who brush the world of criminality or immigration as Latin American, especially the non-white, these attitudes and policies are a threat and signal loss and pain. Through deportation, families have been torn and with Trump there is a promise of even more aggressive systematic deportations. And discomfort is inevitable and necessary when this hits too close to home, when those we love may be affected by this force.

Example of what is known as "scientific racism: Science in defense of American slavery from Types of Mankind, 1854

http://www.wm.edu/as/anthropology/research/ihb/scienceideology/

Second, I think it is important that I clarify a) my political concerns: resisting domination of all vulnerable communities, but seeing particularity white supremecy as one of the most continually neglected and brutal structures in world domination (most neglect by white people) and b) what the Trump election means to this structure of domination. 

Thus, in listening to those affected, to speak of white supremacy is not generally to point to the KKK or Nazis (that is individual bigotry and hate), but to speak of an impersonal system and actions. This system started after the genocide, scientific racism, kidnapping and enslaving of black people. But the wounds have not healed, but hurt and mutate: sociologists have concluded that the biggest determinant of disadvantage across legal, educational, economic, and cultural lines is race.

Thus, for anti-racist activists and intellectuals, white supremacy is defined as a power imbalance: the economic, legal, the conscious or unconscious psychological and cultural structures that continue to privilege white people at the expense of people of color. This has been documented in the following: 1) The case for reparations here, 2) discrimination in the low wage job market here, 3) stereotypes in police visual processing and decision making here. 

Confusion may arise about "black on black" crime and majority color police departments, but white supremacy can and is internalized by everyone, including people of color. The politics of respectibility (where as Arundhati Roy writes, some people are pardoned from oppression) means little because America did not heal the gaping racist wounds. It's tragedy is that our fellow human family, people of color, must reckon with a prison industrial complex with 2.3 million prisoners where they are unjustly over-represented, general power imbalance in economics and leadership, and cultural appropriation/exploitation/tokenism. Watch the film 13 for this.

The relationship to Trump. Trump is not the emergence of fascism, but it is the symbolic representation of white America. The domination structures have already been here. Neither the Left, nor the Right have addressed these structures sufficiently. But I still stand by the fact that since Nixon and Reagan, the right has instituted laws (war on drugs and militarism) continued by the left that hurt people of color. Backed by the largest white majority, the right has been the mastermind and supporter of law and order policies that hurt people of color and across the seas:

whether we write of ALEC orchestrating and furthering the prison complex or the conservative commitment to expanding the military budget and thus the military industrial complex. Trump, his words, spirit, website policies, track record, and the recent criticism of Trump by the Black Lives Matter Movement show that Trump has and will most likely continue "making things worse." This is specifically because his constituency, overwhelmingly white people (as opposed to the democratic party) and he himself has not reckoned with racial justice: the opposite.

I urge us to think about this deeply especially when we are not the most vulnerable. Furthermore, as much great writing has shown, we white progressives have failed. And I take some responsibility for not resisting this enough. We have failed at stepping down and making sure we share and give up power that is often in place for us in some way. We have failed at securing reparations or making it a conversation. We have failed at being in relationship with oppressed, minority, vulnerable communities. We have failed at being in relationship with all white America, holding it accountable. I would argue, being educationally privileged, we may have othered and even participated in the classist marginalization of whites who are stuck in poverty.

Thus, again, there is work to be done. Most importantly, how to reconfigure relationships and power in our life to the service of the WHOLE. This does not mean centrism. This means working to dismantle white supremacy with our whole being, listening, losing jobs, sharing of resources, and giving up leadership positions. Let this letter serve as my hand reaching out to EVERYONE, a pact to listen to each other and especially transform this lisenting into understanding, growth and new action.

With justice and love and peace,

Konstantin

Transcript of Introduction: Art and Activism Panel, Judson Memorial Church, July 9, 2016

I

Introduction

by Konstantin Kulakov

summer - latin night -­ gay club ­- bodies - safe in sanctuary ­- bodies opened to dance - ­waiting in the bathroom ­ - bodies opened with bullets ­- queer bodies ­- Puerto Rican bodies - black bodies ­- sacred bodies ­ bodies heavy with guilt of living

Louisiana ­- Alton, the CD man ­- black body ­- ground -­ father -­ chest opened­ red -­ red shirt -­ “shots fired” -­ “shots fired” -­ the children ­- an arm moving -­ an arm becoming still - 

Minnesota ­- traffic stop -­ black bodies -­ boyfriend -­ black body -­ gun permit -­ child - ­backseat - father -­ police -­ bullet -­ metal -­ father -­ arm ­- child ­ “jesus please don’t let my boyfriend die"

Activist Mariame Kaba, who will join us during Part II of the panel wrote in the New Inquiry the Summer of 2015: “I dread summer. It’s the season of hyper­surveillance and even more aggressive policing of young people of color in my neighborhood... The urban summer criminalization merry­go­round...” I dread summer becoming a refrain throughout the article. After Pulse, after Sterling after Castile, this refrain is loud and getting louder. A tension, an unease I heard in the singing of Sekou, in the brush of Alfonse, in the words of Browning, in the visual culture of Natasha Johnson and Husains’s cinematography in the Martyr, and all the panelists here today.

We have come together from incredibly different backgrounds, experiences, privileges and disadvantages; still, we have come with the conviction that both art and activism are connected, that they are valuable, that the brushes and the spray paint, the pianos and the larynx, the words and the colors, the song, the dance and the movement must be connected to the suffering of the world, to social justice, to acting, to activism, to the vulnerable, to politicians, and profits. That there are tasks ahead to address the dominant cultural white supremacist lens: As the poet Claudia Rankine writes, “Because white men can’t police their imaginations, black men are dying.” And if we are activists, that in our legal advocacy, commentary, direct actions, civil disobedience, in our protests, boycotts, art is valuable and powerful and functions as activism. We have come to explore experiences and ideas together.

Since not all are artists are activists per se and not all activists are artists, we will devote two different PARTS to the panel, exploring the arts and activism from each perspective: Part I: the Arts (11 am to 12:00) and Part II: Activism (1:00 pm to 2:30 pm). Each part will be followed by your questions. Perhaps, the binary, the opposition of art and activism does not even have to exist, perhaps for some of us it should because our artistic process has no agendas and rises from the unconscious, but for different reasons... Maybe Peter Burger is right, (here summarized by poet Ben Lerner) “abolish art as a separate category from the rest of our experience.” And make it the “praxis of life.” But one thing we can agree on is this: our different bodies have given us completely different experiences and insight, and we must enter into respectful presence, listening and relationship to make a more whole world. 

I hope this panel can be that kind of event, an unfolding of a new way of being in the world. I trust that we will have the courage to balance sensitivity and productivity as we make this time and space meaningful in our encounter. Last night, Jeff Duda of the The Artistry of Democracy podcast reminded me that the event will be recorded and that press will be present. What we say will enter into an collective memory that can be used beyond itself. But before we begin, I want thank everyone who was key in organizing this event:

Judson Memorial Church, Micah Bucey, Michele Thompson, Toby Twining, Zach Mosely, Jane Truehold, my partner Sabrina Frometa, my mother and father. And I would like to thank you. In a time of what Donna Schaper calls “time famine,” our decision to volunteer our time is subversive. Finally, I would like to agree with a close mentor of mine, black liberation theologian, James Cone, there is never disembodied objectivity, and I have a responsibility to say who I am and my origins, as a Russian American immigrant poet who is also a white male.

Alton Sterling

After leaving the waters of Puerto Plata to arrive in New York, I watched how another human being, Alton Sterling, laid on the ground, moving his arm tragically, chest opened with bullets...for selling CD's. This is today; now. And the coldness of the police had nothing to say but "shots fired" as he breathed his last. I remembered Eric Garner placed in a banned choke-hold...for selling loose cigarettes. And the coldness of the police, the EMT's, and the justice department had nothing to offer him and his family, the human family but the steel of more guns.

After watching the trauma last night, I went to sleep to the warmth of my life-giving partner, embracing her beautiful skin and its blackness, asking: Is this white response a coldness, or emptiness of spirit: A society structured around fear, criminalization of black bodies, more guns, and a "law and order" that preserves white lives and property. Emptiness. This is emptiness. Because what is evil but the lack of love that can bind us towards moral responsibility, reparations, healing and wholeness.

We are not there, we do not want healing and wholeness, we want more "power" and "things," because we (and hear I speak of white people) have not even collectively admitted the danger of our disease. We may choose to deny it, but if we "love thy neighbor as ourselves," we are still in a hell where the painful shrieks of Sterling's son and mother rise-up. This "law and order" that preserves white privilege and property has an ugly underbelly. And this ugliness will rise up and swallow up everything if we do not ADMIT this and ACT.