"I do not believe that Mahmoud Khalil should have been in a position to teach the public a lesson about principled solidarity and principled action. And yet, when he was taken away from his family, unjustly detained for over one hundred days, had the moment of this child's birth stolen from him, and endured the horrors of separation and detention (which of course are not unique to him) he often made efforts to decenter himself, to recenter the Palestinian people. He did not waver on his principles or his stance in order to appeal to some imaginary moral center of the state. He was steadfast in his beliefs and his purpose, and he was steadfast in his own humanity, which allowed him clarity when it came to the humanity of others.
I was a teenager in the months immediately following 9/11, and, at the time, my initial approach was to make these incredibly flawed and ridiculous (but youthfully and foolishly idealistic) appeals to the Broader Public. This might seem familiar, because you still see people doing it today, years later. "I'm a Good Muslim! I go to school and play sports and listen to music like you!" And I remain thankful that after a bit, I had an elder pull me aside and ask me exactly who I believed myself to be making those appeals to. Who was the audience, and what was the reaction I was hoping to gain?
And I didn't have any logical or material response. I had a lot of emotional responses, but even those were empty. It came down to this reality of self-centering. I want to be seen as human so that I can stay safe. But it's a myth, and it is a myth that comes at the expense of principled, active, urgent solidarity.
The central industry of America is war. That's it. That's the whole thing, and it has been for my whole life, and your whole life, and for lives before ours. So many technological advances exist to allow for the potential to become "better" at war. Where you are, right now, it may be too hot to survive outside for more than a few minutes at a time. Where you are, right now, despite the heat, there may not be cooling centers open.
And yet, there are people, your neighbors, trying to survive on the streets, because there isn't money to adequately house people or feed people or offer them even a brief respite from a growing and ongoing climate disaster that is exacerbated by war, which there is always money for. Cops and ICE and the security guards lining high schools are all trained as if they are in war, and so everyday people get caught up in the results of wartime fantasies.
Dehumanization exists to uphold industry. Slavery, an industry. Prisons, an industry. War, an industry. All of them (and others) reliant on an embedded societal understanding that many, many, people are either already lesser, or can very easily drift into a category of lesser, depending on the justification(s) that must be made for violence, and there are always justifications for violence and there are always people willing to believe them, there are always people who are going to read stories about a tank firing into a crowd of starving people in Gaza and then go about their day feeling little to nothing, and I don't believe an appeal to those people serves as useful work, either.
I am not interested in appealing to the imaginary moral center of any empire, because that moral center doesn't exist. Everyone's mileage may vary, but I would offer that actual principled resistance and movements of principled resistance are born out of people with such a strong and unwavering commitment to their own humanity that they actually do not want any appeals for it tied up in this (or any other) monstrous landscape.
Principled resistance, I think, is at least in part extremely reliant on people who are so deeply connected to and secure in their own humanity that it doesn't take them much emotional or mental labor to see and connect to the humanity of others and then actively, urgently, fight for survival and liberation through whatever it takes.
There is actually no magic scale-tipping event that will undo the rotted psyche of empire. If a moral center did exist, it has been long gone, before I was even born. I have no interest in pleading for a recognition of the humanity of any oppressed peoples, because I believe so firmly in it, and I believe so firmly in it because there have been years, and years of documented resistance in all forms, and I know that resistance exists due to a connection with one's own humanity, so loving and so rigorous that people refuse to be wiped out, refuse to be occupied into invisibility.
It doesn't seem useful, to me, to center one's desire for their own humanity to be recognized and cherished by a country with an industry of war that depends on an industry of dehumanization. I personally do not want my own humanity pressed into that machine (a machine that would reject it, to be clear). I am secure in both my humanity and also the labor it requires out of me. I cherish mine so that I can easily cherish yours. I think a very selfless action that costs very little is the action of decentering the self and the need to appeal to the morals of a deeply unwell society. There is no sanitizing this place, and there is no sanitizing yourself through appealing to a heart that does not function."
*Photo is of the Justice for Janitors Strike, Century City, Los Angeles, 1990. Police attacked and beat peaceful marchers and demonstrators with batons, putting dozens in the hospital, including a pregnant woman who later miscarried.
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