As this novel coronavirus spreads faster and kills more people across our country, there’s a fearsome notion spreading along with it — that the United States is on the brink of a new civil war, fueled by police violence, the ubiquity of firearms and the intolerable stranglehold of institutional racism.
It’s entirely possible that we are already engaged in a guerrilla civil war between America’s culture of hate and prideful ignorance and, as Lincoln described them, the “better angels of our nature,” a struggle extending back to the first Civil War and coming to florescence in the 1960s-70s and reinvigorated by the appalling conditions of the present moment.
We can see it surfacing in New Mexico. A few weeks back one of my favorite local columnists, Joline Gutierrez Krueger in the Albuquerque Journal, ran a column on a woman here who had received a particularly ugly piece of hate mail over a sign that she displays on her property, the same sign that I have on my front door, and that many in our city also display.
The sign reads: “In this House We Believe…No Human is Illegal. Love is Love. Science is Real. Woman’s Rights are Human Rights. Black Lives Matter. Water is Life. And Kindness is Everything.”
Displaying such a sign, some people say, is an act of “allyship.” The person who sent the hate mail said terrible things in brutally violent and threatening language about the sign and its liberal heresies. It was a traumatizing confrontation in our ongoing guerrilla war.
The sign’s invention is attributed to a librarian in Wisconsin, Kristin Garvey, who put together rallying cries from across many fronts after Trump’s election victory in 2016. It’s been localized across the country. New Mexicans have added Water is Life, I think. Black Lives Matter was coined in 2013 by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi. Women’s Rights are Human Rights rose to the surface in Hillary Clinton’s speech in 1995 in Beijing, but dates to the 1980s. No Human is Illegal has been used by immigrant activists since 2015. Love is Love is the name of an LGBTQ organization in Alaska and was first used in 2012. Science is Real is a 2009 song by the band “They Might be Giants.” Although she takes no credit, the use of Kindness Is Everything on the sign originates, it appears, with Kristin Garvey.
People display that sign because it rings true to them. They probably don’t consider themselves brave or eloquent, but they have chosen sides in this growing struggle in our country. The word “allyship” is probably as new to some of them as it was to me. The concept, however, we know intuitively. A website called guidetoallyship.com includes some of the following points in describing the term. “To be an ally is to …. Amplify voices of the oppressed before your own; Acknowledge that even though you feel pain, the conversation is not about you; Stand up, even when you feel scared; Own your mistakes and de-center yourself; Understand that your education is up to you and no one else.”
A powerful act of “allyship” was announced recently by the New Mexico Environmental Law Center who acknowledged it “stands in solidarity with a broad alliance of environmental justice groups, activists, allies, and partners from across the country” that has “released a call to action highlighting that disparities experienced by people of color during the COVID-19 crisis reflects environmental racism and a long history of discrimination and segregation.”
The call to action drafted by the Title VI Alliance, the Center said, “shows how the confluence of crises in the U.S. have exposed the sacrifice zones to which we relegate communities of color, immigrants, indigenous people and other marginalized groups, and includes specific steps the country must take to begin to rectify the legacy of harm from racist policies and institutions.”
In New Mexico, polluted sacrifice zones like the Mountain View Neighborhood in Albuquerque’s South Valley, Navajo and Laguna tribal lands riddled with open pit uranium mines and still suffering from the giant radioactive Church Rock spill in in 1979 and poor neighborhoods poisoned by jet fuel, fire retardant and other spills at Air Force bases around the state are all part of a pattern of reflexive environmental racism that has taken its monstrous toll of soaring illness during this current epidemic.
In describing the motives behind the creation of In This House We Believe signs, Kristin Garvey said, “I’m not someone who can speak out eloquently. I just put the sign in my yard for myself, to remember that I need to do the research, and to remind my kids.” She also has taken a course on Black history and activism called Justified Anger. She said if she was to do the sign now she would have added “anger is justified.”
The best weapon we can have in this guerrilla war is to follow Garvey’s example and do the research.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Thanks as always for your insightful Monday reflections!
I have found watching the PBS series Eye on the Prize that was rebroadcast and be found on YouTube a powerful history lesson, not to mention the eye opening work “The Racial Contract” by Charles W. Mills. Until we confront the small ways in which we exercise our white privilege daily, we all are responsible for maintaining the status quo.