Running 'Til You're Nothing Sounds A Lot Like Being Free
I tried to wash my brain out in a river this week
“Skin to earth, as often as possible.”
My friend Julie put that phrase in an Instagram story the other day, plain white text overlaid on a video of her standing barefoot in a creek. I felt that call deeply. Deeply. My friends rib me about it but there’s a reason why I occasionally spend most of the day facedown in the dirt burrowing with fingers and toes, breathing it all in, counting the bugs. It’s the same impulse that leads me to touch tree trunks and leaves when I walk past them. I don’t know if it’s some deep primitive thing, some species memory that still makes me feel safe in the trees, that makes my hands say thank you before my brain has consciously decided to. Maybe it’s the opposite, some elevated human desire for beauty. Maybe those are actually not opposites at all.
So I made grand plans to go out hiking on Wednesday for the first time in two months, to go seek some of that out. A river, too. I don’t normally talk like this but my heart has been calling out for a river for a few weeks and the day promised to be hot and I am healthy for the first time in a while and it felt like a good day to go out beneath the trees and trace the path of rushing water.
Of course there are the usual complications that the world offers. In my case my plan was foiled by an unanticipated road closure. I was still fifteen miles of narrow forest road away from my planned trailhead when it abruptly ended in a row of concrete blocks and orange cones. Behind them the road I thought I was taking was missing its leftmost third, crumbled away by age or rockslide or some other force beyond me. (If anything still surprises me, of East Coast upbringing, about the West, it’s that there are plenty of places within an hour’s drive of the city where the world feels unfinished and remote. You get the sense you’re heading toward that wildness when you drive far enough east on Highway 2; the trestle bridges and train tracks and brown wooden signs and the sun behind the mountains can make you feel like you’ve been transported a hundred years into the past. But it’s still occasionally jarring to have those reminders manifest themselves when you least expect it.)
Instead I turned the car around and went back to an open stretch of road by the river, whose proximity was the whole purpose for picking this particular hike in the first place. The Skykomish River is fed by streams pouring off of an eponymous peak, still heavy and fast with snowmelt at this time of year, the sort of jarringly cold water you only really find in the mountains.
I spent close to 3 hours sitting on the bank waiting for the sun to rise high enough above the trees to warm me up to a degree that would make a dip in the deep water seem reasonable. In that time I got a lot of reading done, but I also tried to sort out the myriad feelings I have about the most recent high-profile police killing, of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Or more accurately I tried to sort out my feelings about the reaction to it.
Something that sticks out to me about all the social media responses to this murder—and it was a murder, make no mistake—is that American culture is so predicated on the myth of individualism that most people have been led to believe that reforming themselves is the only thing they can do. They just need to read the right books, watch the right TED talks, listen to the right people, and then they’ll get it, and then (this is where I always lose the thread) they’ll be better positioned to help in the future, or at least they will personally do less harm, which seems to get equated with changing the system.
What most of these prescriptions are missing is any sort of outward action. In the rare instances they do, like this Medium piece that’s been making the rounds again, the prescriptions are outdated, predicated on the notion that stopping individual bad actors is the goal, and sometimes even actively harmful. (Item #1 in that piece is “make sure your local cops have body cameras”, but we have years of evidence showing that body cams don’t decrease the number of police murders, they increase the number of videos of police murders. Item #2 is “make sure your local cops have to do de-escalation and sensitivity training”, but the evidence shows that doesn’t really work and might only serve to create good PR for the police departments willing to undergo it. The rest of the list is filled with ways for white people to know more and do better, which mainly seems to involve following specific Twitter accounts that the (white) author has personally found compelling.)
Please know that I am sympathetic to these impulses. The scale of so many problems—climate change, capitalism, police violence, mass incarceration—is so incomprehensible that most people return to just trying to do a little something to better themselves. But the result of that is, I think, always going to be more helplessness and hopelessness. A huge section of my majority-white Facebook friends list has been up in arms on social media for the past six or seven years with each new police murder of a black civilian. What has changed? Has anything?
Unfortunately the helplessness you feel at moments like these—which grows, not lessens, over time, as you are forced to wonder anew how this keeps happening despite your earnest efforts to make yourself less racist—is a feature, not a bug. That the virtue of the Individual reigns supreme in the American imagination is awfully convenient for the ruling class of this country. Let me show you what I mean by offering an example of a different sort of behavior that white people who want to stand up for justice could engage in:
Of course not everyone has a union (which is also a feature, not a bug, of the current political system), meaning not everyone has the framework for engaging in such direct, concrete action readily available. But I hope this example is illustrative of the larger point: it’s collective action that gets the goods. Now, for Mr. Trout to even think this way, to find it important to stand up for the Minneapolis demonstrators in the first place, he surely had to have done a lot of the deep thinking and examination about race and injustice that is so heavily prescribed at moments like these. But he didn’t stop there. He and his coworkers got organized and leveraged the power that they collectively held, while creating an avenue for people outside his workplace to support that action.
I guess what I’m encouraging here is that after you spend some time thinking about privilege, you start thinking about power. Malcolm X once held up John Brown as an example of what white allyship should look like—and John Brown certainly understood the power that he could muster, and acted accordingly. It’s probably also worth noting that John Brown didn’t try to take over the armory all by himself, he organized a whole big group to do it. But assuming that we won’t be taking that avenue any time soon (not least because the firepower of those upholding our brutally oppressive systems has improved somewhat since 1854), we have to use our power in other ways.
We know—we know—that George Floyd will not be the last. He might not even be the last this week, this month! So what are we going to do about that? How are we going to sleep when the next one happens and we’ve poured all our time and energy into the “physician, heal thyself” thing, and no police officers have been disarmed in the meantime?
Ralph Milliband, Marxism and Politics, Chapter 5
I don’t have all the answers. But I do know that organizing is the only thing that has ever made me feel less hopeless. And beyond how I feel about it, it’s one of the only ways that actually works. If you walk off a job by yourself to protest an injustice, you’ll get fired. If you walk off a job with every single one of your coworkers, making it impossible for your boss to profit off of any of you that day? The power balance shifts. The same logic applies here. Does it do more harm to a racist police state when we run ourselves ragged trying to root out every individual bad actor in the system, or when bus drivers band together to shut down the buses that the police want to use to transport arrestees? When we write one more letter to an elected official, or when tech workers shut down their operations to prevent facial recognition technology from being finished and delivered to law enforcement?
You probably aren’t a city bus driver. But if you’re reading this there’s a good chance you have a job, which means you have coworkers, which means you have power.
Don’t get me wrong: like all things worth doing, organizing is hard work. It is a long unsexy process and you will fail more often as you win. But the alternative—ramming your head into the wall over and over again wondering why things aren’t getting any better—seems to me to be far worse.
This isn’t, from my perspective, an abstract thought exercise. If you have read this far and found this at all compelling I’d like to work with you to think through what kind of organizing—right now, or down the line—you might engage in to build solidarity and actually threaten the systems that oppress so many. I want to talk to you about what this could look like if you’re a teacher or a tech worker or a student or an accountant.
I’m sorry for going long and maybe even getting preachy. This is maybe not what you were expecting to see in this newsletter, but I feel very strongly that alternatives to the usual platitudes need to be considered. Thank you for reading, as always.
-Chuck