- Stephen Salaita on stupidity of electoral discourse in the United States. Archived Message
Posted by johnhol
on April 3, 2019, 1:02 pm
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Begins: I’ve long deployed what I consider a simple viewpoint about US elections (congressional and presidential): if leftists choose to participate, they should do it without making certain people disposable. In other words, don’t commit to movements that require the downtrodden anywhere in the world to remain in states of hardship or dispossession. US electoralism, by design, assiduously elides the needs and aspirations of communities whose freedom would disrupt imperial and colonial accumulation. Few groups are more familiar with this culture of disposability than Palestinians. Many leftist advocates of electoralism conceptualize Palestinians not as a colonized people in need of relief, but as impracticalities best relegated to the periphery of grown-up politics. (Any talk about freeing Palestine is meaningless if the Westerner’s gratification comes first.) Support of Palestine certainly impedes electoral success. It’s a serious problem. But a greater problem is prioritization of electoral success at the expense of a decolonial politics. Relief for Palestinians is coming, we’re told. Just wait until this person with a history of selling out Palestine acquires an obscene amount of power. The narrative is neither praxis nor analysis. It is petulant grotesquerie. No oppressed person wants to hear more nonsense from the white moderate. Purveyors of this grotesquerie have a plan: they’ll “educate” the candidate. This plan has an unacknowledged problem, though: the candidate doesn’t listen. When Palestinians express dismay about congressional aspirants or congresspeople who affirm ethnic cleansing (directly or implicitly), it’s hard to imagine a more vacuous, callous response than “you need to educate them!” It shifts the onus of moral negligence from elites articulating a fundamentally violent position onto the recipients of that violence. Convincing allies to quit disposing of us in order to expedite their electoral fantasies is enough of a time-suck without the burden of yelling into a void. Besides, politicians aren’t ignorant; they function within a milieu that rewards meticulous selectivity. Anybody who runs for Congress or president knows that Palestine/Israel will come up. The candidate will have spent plenty of time rehearsing answers and honing avoidance tactics, usually with the help of professional Zionists. An unwillingness to speak isn’t ignorance. And a halting presentation of safe talking points isn’t naivete. They are textbook dissimulation, easy to recognize by anyone uninterested in excusing opportunism. Exhorting the colonized to enlighten agents of the state as a way to mitigate oppression betrays a severe misunderstanding of the US political system. In any case, these eager teachers fail to explain how education is possible when they treat both criticism and inquiry (i.e., “education”) as sacrilege. Continues: https://stevesalaita.com/find-me-someone-better/ |
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