“I realized that regardless of the tragedy, regardless of the grief, regardless of the monstrous challenge, Some of Us Have Not Died. Some of us did not die… and what shall We do, We Who Did Not Die?”

images from @blackwomenradicals on Instagram, displaying 1968 protests against a Columbia-proposed, gentrifying bid for a gym in Morningside Park (dubbed "gym crow" by students and Harlem residents). Protests coincided with student pressure for the administration to divest from and denounce the Vietnam War (several professors and affiliates worked with US military weapons dealers), and culminated in the occupation of several buildings. 

This week, university students around the country made headlines as they took defiant stances against their institutions in support of ending the genocide on Gaza. There is much to be said about the activism of Columbia students and the history of encampments in general, but as a Columbia University student who left because of my disabilities, I am keenly aware of how we are leaving disabled people behind in our organizing for liberation.

Of course, I am enraged by institutions for not acting in the empathetic interests of true education and social advancement, but as someone with experience with marginalization (I’m a poor disabled asian trans dyke), it’s safe to say these colonial institutions were never what I had the most faith in. 

I am angry, too, with the students of Columbia University and those reporting on their “occupation,” as there’s been a myopic, US-centered self-interested, anti-globalist shift in our conversations and a concerning lack of access in our organizing. 

Though actual student protestors at Columbia have released clear and necessary statements against the co-optation of the movement for Palestinian liberation, I feel it necessary to explain my simultaneous disappointment in the profound display of “solidarity” made by students, faculty, and allies. Like many terms of the movement from “mutual aid” to “intersectionality,” the solidarity we are witnessing, I believe, has the potential to be disingenuous, misleading, and even deceptive. 

My current disappointment stems, in part, with the faculty, students, speakers, and panelists who have boycotted and protested as “allies to Columbia students.” To ally oneself with privileged students who receive one of the most financially impressive and elitist educations in the world, is already red flag number one. My initial questions about the Columbia encampment grew to concern when I saw similar ones pop up at Yale and other selective schools in reaction to the CU administration’s collaborating with the NYPD and FBI to remove forcefully arrest and abuse their own students, as opposed to, you know, actual Gazan people, and indigenous people in general. This, of course, is all in the same week that we learned of hundreds of bodies in mass graves at Al Nasser hospital in Khan Younis. Bodies were found in horrific displays of the IDF’s brutality, with men, women, and children being treated for wounds found mutilated, beheaded, and even with organs missing. Recent coverage in Gaza mirrors that of the uncovering of mass graves of thousands of Indigenous children, who often died due to malnourishment, and physical and sexual abuse at boarding schools (forced-assimilation colonial camps) in both the U.S. and Canada. 

Obviously, it’s important to take a stance against the Columbia administration for mobilizing the NYPD en-masse to arrest hundreds of students. But to stop there is to be missing the point of all the “work” we were supposed to have been doing since whenever we last woke up. To anyone who has been paying attention, Columbia’s allegiance with the police makes perfect sense. Columbia is the largest landowner in New York (they avoid paying almost $180 million in taxes every year while they poach and gentrify Harlem, Manhattanville, and Washington Heights). Like most if not all universities today, they are ultimately guided by money and capital, so their reluctance to give up lucrative, forthcoming ethnic cleansing investments through the Tel Aviv Center, Dual Degree Programs, and other cash crops, can only possibly be rescued by crying “terrorist!” on their own students. What’s most disappointing is the seemingly new and confusing circumstances my peers, teachers, and admin claim to be facing, despite me being the one who was too crazy to be a full-time student, and was subsequently forced to leave school in October. Did we all forget “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” or was that just a reading assignment y’all got chatGPT to write for you? (Lest us not forget the blatant exploitation and traumatization of Kenyan workers that went into creating chatGPT’s software, but I digress.)

So let’s rewind. In my fall term of my sophomore year, at the beginning of October 2023, my partner and I were forced to leave Columbia University due to medical reasons and the school’s inability to accommodate our needs. After realizing we were putting our bodies through unimaginable trauma from neglecting our invisible disabilities, and then experiencing massive periods of burnout from academic stress, our needs could no longer be ignored. When we initially confronted our friends about changes in our lifestyle to support sensory, mobility, and learning needs, they thought that we demanded “too much change” from the school, and even from them. This was our last straw, and our first big push to reject the internalized ableism and White Supremacy Culture contributing to their responses. So we left.

In this scenario, I feel it necessary to call out those I once called my “peers,” alongside those who up until now have been silent about the calculated destruction of the Gazan people, but suddenly speak out against… what exactly? Is it that they’re surprised the institutions built by enslaved black people, who founded research that medicalized the madnesses of poor, queer, disabled, femme bodies of color, and created the most world-destroying nuclear technologies of human existence, those institutions are the ones *checks notes* criminalizing students? Well, I guess the folks who voted for the “Leopards eating peoples’ faces off” party are shocked to find their representatives are Leopards eating peoples’ faces off. 

Nevertheless, I hope my criticisms are understood from a place of good faith. After all, we are our actions, and thus are ever changing. I hope for the better. My remaining friends at Barnard have told me of their beautiful experiences at the encampment and how hopeful they are for the learning and community displayed there. Of course, I’m writing this from a thousand miles away, where all I have is a screen to tell me, somewhere, it’s real. And it’s true. Something is coming. 

I’ve seen videos of students rushing in to tarp and umbrella each other in the night as rainfall endures and the encampment floods. Circles of songs and drums on the lawns. Poem readings and discussions. Overtaking admittance week and encouraging admitted students to participate in the encampments events and speaking engagements. This is a time of learning and organizing in the face of grave adversity among largely first-gen, low-income BIPOC students suspended, evicted, and unhoused by their school, given only 15 minutes to collect their stuff, and then banned from campus, dorms, buildings, classrooms, and even dining halls. The stream of love, respect, and student/teacher/alumni fostering is courageous, if not incredibly brave. The CU encampment has adopted the language of “we take care of us” to reject the university’s total denial of responsibility over barely-minted adults.

I’m simultaneously frustrated, envious, and inspired to see Columbia students’ ongoing encampment, along with a revitalizing outpour of community support, immense disturbances to neoliberal desires for “business as usual,” and the ripple-effect of recognition felt nationwide and globally. Finally, the world is not silent! (But is the spotlight so good?)

I’m fighting the urge to look to my not-so-unique circumstance for “what if”s. I am envious and inspired because I wonder what possibilities there could be, had I not listened to my body and stayed. If I was physically able to be there: contribute, sit, volunteer, listen, and mourn in community. To get involved in campus organizing as I had intended before being rushed home for months of prolonged (and ongoing) isolation. If I was physically able to expose myself to the sensory overload of putting my body on the line, through music and sirens and noise, through crowds and crowds of masked (and many unmasked people). If I was financially able to have stayed as a part-time student, instead of jumping ship entirely. With the rush of what-if’s, they often lead to other more unsolvable, untenable questions. What if I had received the gender affirming care I was promised from Columbia’s health plan, instead of months of delays from understaffed healthcare professionals serving over 20k students? What if I could have attended classes virtually when my panic attacks and dissociation were so violent I couldn’t leave my dorm? The questions lead nowhere, except back to pitying my own displacement rather than recognizing the shared feelings of truncated time with the students of Gaza, the students of Sudan, of Congo, of Tigray. Anywhere kids are grown by the time they lose a loved one or a limb. Until I recognize that’s what our oppression is meant to do—isolate and fearmonger, police, compete, disable—I cannot reject that pedagogy. I am thankful for my disabling because it reminds me of my shared humanity, my smallness, and my very big feelings. 

Nevertheless, what am I supposed to feel as someone forced out of this very community, both by ableist social support and institutional demands for optimization, productivity, and, without fail, academic excellence? What am I supposed to feel as I see videos across social media of known-predators, white men with indie sleaze mustaches who are proud of their diverse music tastes (and friend groups), singing along on their “occupied” pristine campus lawns to anti-indigenous anthems like “This Land Is Your Land” by Woody Guthrie? (I can’t hear this song without thinking of when Jennifer Lopez performed it for Joe Biden’s Inauguration. If you’re not a fan of American Nationalism, you’ve been warned.) As mentioned, statements have been made by key Pro-Palestinian groups on campus, like SJP, about the denouncement of these virtue signaling individuals, yet where, if any, is the centering of the indigenous Lenape People alongside the indigenous Gazans they divest for? How, especially, can we use social media as a tool for strategizing and organizing, a tactic long-used by disabled and house-bound individuals, while simultaneously making participation in the movement inaccessible unless we can individually show up?

Though my issues with Columbia are valid and not by any means unique, I am tired because, I know, as a disabled person with mobility and sensory needs, I likely would be pushed out or invisibilized by this very moment. And, as you may recall, disability is an oppression that can occur at any time, so every issue is a disability issue. Thus, a movement that leaves us behind can never truly be liberatory.

May we learn from one another in this time of momentum, and may all walls fall. 

from Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, 1968
"Columbia University, as an institution owned and run by the same interests that run corporate America, can never support an education directed to the overthrow of those interests. A revolutionary movement wishing to educate revolutionaries can not come to terms with Columbia. Ultimately its goal must be to destroy Columbia.

References/recommendations for doing more research and staying updated:

• Instagram: there are MANY on-the-ground activists, journalists, organizers, writers, artists, and community members but here are just a handful who have recently posted about college encampments for Gaza, abolition, police encounters, and how to support Palestinian liberation.
  • @sjp.columbia
  • @cunygse
  • @anthony.depice
  • @comradecami
  • @pal_actionus
  • @ykreborn
  • @beyonkz
• Essays:
  • Ismatu Gwendolyn’s “to Columbia’s undergraduates (and students everywhere): HOLD THE LINE.”
• Books:
  • I highly recommend checking out Verso’s Reading List for Free Palestine!

In lieu of an essay to share with you all this week, I thought to share resources through to someone who’s been my guiding compass these past few months. 

I’ve been following Ismatu (all pronouns, with respect) for the greater part of two years on Tiktok, but only recently with the events of October 7th and the ongoing 170+ days of genocide at the hands of Zionist-led settler colonialism have I managed to recognize the immense hope, grief, knowledge, and love they share constantly. And more importantly, how radical it is that they share it, knowingly, for free. 

I initially came across Ismatu’s videos in regard to Capital B Beauty, where, over the course of several dozen videos, they expertly unpacked and simplified a complex academic text, Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness by fat, black queer theorist Da’Shaun L. Harrison. At the time, Ismatu was pursuing his masters degree at the University of Chicago and I had never seen someone take the time to explain Theory in regular plain-english and with awareness of the inaccessibility of most academic texts, especially for the communities they’re describing and attempting to reach. Such is the seed of all of Ismatu’s work, generating further points of access and preaching to the possibility of one’s reach. It was only until recently, in fact in one of Ismatu’s videos, where I learned 54 percent of Americans read below a 6th grade level, so that illiteracy becomes not only a problem of the American populus, but a deliberate maneuver to maintain control over people of the Global Majority. 

Informed by black feminist radical tradition, Ismatu is a black, queer, muslim activist, writer, healer, poet, sex worker, and life-long learner with roots in Sierra Leone. Currently based in New York, their essays range from summaries and analyses of selected readings on theory and praxis to abstract poetry and somatic, grounded discussions of oppression in all forms. Because of their commitment to learning with love, trust, awareness, and care (which innately requires a distancing from policing and other carceral strategies), Ismatu is a trained counselor and mental health professional refusing to be licensed by the state and essentially working for free. All of her writing, including essays, podcasts, quizzes, videos, and even therapy sessions are made available for no charge, allowing Ismatu to divorce from individualistic monetary pursuits and fully align with their pledge for transformative community care. It’s only through the support of mutual aid—that is venmo, cashapp, patreon, substack, and other direct action in the form of just a few dollars from online supporters invested in Ismatu’s quality of life and mission—that any of this is possible. Ismatu’s discussions of mutual aid, policing via medicalization, demystifying “self-care” therapy, and cultivating intergenerational community has been particularly essential for my recent learning in regard to decentering white supremacy culture from my life and any-and-all capitalist aspirations as an abolitionist, writer, and activist. In particular, he’s helped me recognize the interrelatedness of all oppression via patterns within disability justice, housing justice, prison abolition, and more. It’s an honor to be able to share more about Ismatu and their life!

Recommendations for engaging with Ismatu’s work:

Podcasts & Essays:

• Reading of How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind by Dr. LaMarr Jurelle Bruce
• you’ve been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress).
• Mutual Aid is Mutual! Recap + Readings
• Therapists Are Also the Police: Social Work, Sex Work, and the Politics of Deservingness

Videos:

• I love my country//she looks like me. On loving Palestine, forever
• toni cade bambara: i start with the recognition that we are at war

Social Media:

• Instagram: @ismatu.gwendolyn
• Tiktok: @th.readings
• Therapy practice: https://www.ismatu.com/

Similar projects by other disabled, QTBIPOC, and/or abolitionist writers (*including some of Ismatu’s recommendations):

• *Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness by Da’Shaun L. Harrison
• Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
• Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown
• *How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity by Dr. LaMarr Jurelle Bruce
• I Hope We Choose Love by Kai Cheng Thom
• *Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the Next) by Dean Spade
• Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.

While freshmen at Columbia College, my friends and I read Father Comes Home From Wars by Suzan-Lori Parks, the only text off the Core Curriculum by a black woman, or any woman of color, for the whole semester. However, for my friend Ale, his racist older white man teacher upped the ante, turning his discussion of an incredibly subversive and influential piece of literature into a spectacle of inconsiderate performance. Instead of discussing the work at all, or even stepping back and simply encouraging BIPOC students to shape the discussion, my friend’s professor asked every student, one by one, what they would do if they were enslaved. Ale was stunned. He got up and walked out sobbing. 

It was one of those stories you hear about on social media with outrage and empathy, perhaps with the tenured professor put on temporary leave, and an email sent out to the student body reassuring “mental health professionals are here to help!” From my sardonic tone, I hope it’s discernable that this is usually the “best case scenario” response that predominantly-white institutions are prepared to offer, though even this response effectively accomplishes nothing. Nevertheless my friend got no such response, or even an apology from his professor after he explained why he left abruptly and emotionally distraught. 

In preparation for this email and with consideration of ongoing widespread silencing of Third World Women everywhere, I thought “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter To 3rd World Women Writers” by Gloria Anzaldúa would be essential reading for our March agenda. Not only because it’s Womens History Month but also because it’s Disability Awareness Month, and surprise to no one, Gloria Anzaldúa was both. She was also a profound Chicana lesbian poet in the same schools of thought as other radical queer Feminists as Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Toni Cade Bambara and many others. Though she died of complications with diabetes, fellow disabled queer scholars and artists today like Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha recognize her death (along with Lorde’s and other disabled activists at the time) was largely preventable had she received accommodations from her places of work and academic institutions. 

Her speech, letter, and essay “Speaking in Tongues” was first published in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color in 1981, a collection that embodies the collective struggles of Third World Women across race, class, sexuality, and disability spectrums. “Speaking in Tongues” intimately weaves across several entries, describing the necessity of writing for all oppressed women, similar to Lorde’s seminal essay Poetry is Not A Luxury, mentioned in a previous newsletter. Both Lorde and Anzaldúa express the almost-mystical empowerment writing provides for the individual and the culture, as writing releases deep knowledges from within that reveal, overturn, make sense of, and complicate our realities. Writing is one of the only ways to express the madness of oppression, make impossible sense of how racism and sexism pulls on our bodies, contorting ourselves to a point where words are the only things to release us, and our rage. (For more information on madness as disability, medicalized racism, and maneuvering through a society that by its very foundation pushes us further towards madness, I would highly recommend Dr. La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s book How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind—and Ismatu Gwendolyn’s podcast where they read the first chapter for free!)

At a time when radical writing and unapologetic queer disabled expression is constantly contested—from hundreds of bills passed against queer existence, violent protests against Drag Queens reading to children, literal genocide, and, of course, banning books—I wanted to push myself towards creating something new. Not that anything is wrong with unearthing and resuscitating other great work with hopes you’ll read it and treat it with care. I suppose that’s nice, yet it’s also not the point. With this reading, I urge you to look into yourself, Dear Bi-Weekly Newsletter Reader, and perhaps even create something new. Write a letter to your 13 year-old self. Meditate on when you made the wrong decision and what you would do now. Write a poem from somewhere deep, dark, and ancient inside you. Of course, be wary and cautious, but also allow those feelings, the writing itself, to take you somewhere all on its own. As Ismatu Gwendolyn writes, after Toni Morrison, “If you surrender to the Madness, you can ride it:”

~ ~

Dear Friend,

I was thinking about memory and regret, or maybe just remembering because while reading, I felt the force of a flashback to when Alejandro’s professor asked him what he would do had he been enslaved and all he could think was to cry. And look for me. Instead, I told him to be quiet, small, and out of my camera’s frame as I joined a Zoom meeting with my professor and tried to impress her with my essay preparation. For how long I kept up my mask? Fifteen minutes turned to 30… I really don’t remember. I don’t even know what my paper was about. If I had questions about sources and citations—would MLA or Chicago be more suitable? It felt like seconds until I was able to join my then-Friend, almost lover depending on the definition, and crawl back into that tiny space he called his heart. For up to 40 minutes, I left him there on the floor, tucked into a ball, hyperventilating and shaking. Or worse, I didn’t just abandon him there, I forced his isolation too. 

While snuggling my blanket off my bed, he sobbed for the first time in years, holding back heaves and chokes so my poor prof wouldn’t be inconvenienced by her colleagues’ damage. I am so sorry to the little boy who could not cry, and to the one that I too scarred. Was it not his father but me, who hit him when he was too loud? Was it not I who yelled at or even shushed his profound yawps of pain and joy? It may have been his father or mother who first opened those cuts, or even racist teachers who asked unanswerable, cruel hypotheticals for classroom debate, but was it not I who clamped his wounds open? Implacable to heal by soft words alone. 

While he hugged my backpack, rocking himself back to regulation, I took notes on Form and the academic investigation of the Problem. While he sweat through his socks, stamping one hand on my bedframe and the other squeezing my hand for reassurance, I resented his big dumb tears. Was I too ashamed to have a heart like his, that I would risk his health, safety, and trust, and my humanity, for a Zoom meeting about an essay? I’m sorry, too, to that overworked, high-masking autistic lesbian that I once was. Why did no one teach you decency? Lest we forget, mercy is an act of courage. Was everyone so busy with invisibly surviving poverty, they forgot to teach you how to love as an action? How to show up without money or time to spare, yet infinite to give willingly and freely? I pray she chooses love. 

When Alejandro had another attack so bad he went non-verbal for almost 60 minutes, I didn’t know what to do. It was no longer fall. We were older and it was early summer, but still late enough into Pride Month that he could go home without feeling guilty about missing the corporate parade. I tell myself now it was too late but it never is. After all, Audre Lorde says, “Only nothing is eternal.” I made him drink water when his lips could not open wide enough for words. I hugged his cold, distant body, no longer clamoring for kinetic connection like it did that time nearly nine months before. Or maybe even less. Is it the professional opinion that nine months is enough for a human being to form, as well as to break down, change in impossible soul-scattering ways? As I laid my weight on that once so-alive boy, I feared it was too late. I felt not even my own pulse, no spark to jump his battery. I lay on a memory.

But I still dream of you. Always turned away. Always younger or older, yet always alive, even if not-the-same or never-the-same-as-when-we-were. He is out there with skin as warm and fragrant as mine, in beds and bodies not unlike mine and ours. 

I do not have such great aching fears of the irreconcilable loss of us, anymore. My subconscious urges me elsewhere. He may not be that boy anymore, let alone a boy at all. One I’d recognize without holding his hand in mine, but I see him without hope or expectation. I see him then and now. I see mi cielo in my most pressing dreams, no matter if shrouded by dark clouds or even kites. For I know he is there, like the wind or the sea. Life still bubbles through him, noise foaming over, flushing wounds clean. Bare.

My love, What binds us to this tree

must demand our relief. 

Take this bark, sink your teeth. 

When it all burns, the ash will stain.

Do not forget the gift of its marking.

Until then, sway sway. The 

Tupelo growls. The wind turns. 

Bending light, we roll our wings upward. 

Ascending, gliding. My string snaps and I cast off

Into that infinite swirling

Spell of air.

Again, I will find you.

I’ve worried for too long. It’s nearly 4am and my cat, Garm, cannot rest without me cradling him. I promise I’ve learned how to hold you. I cannot hate myself for this anymore. But have you learned how to ask to be held? I need lovers with voices, I realize. Goodnight to all who bear the silence. I love you, but no action of love can give you the voice I need to hear. Make peace.

Works that informed this piece:

• Audre Lorde’s essay “Poetry is Not A Luxury”
• Gloria Anzaldúa’s essay “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter To 3rd World Women Writers”
• La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s book How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind
• Ismatu Gwendolyn’s essay “There Is No Revolution without Madness.”
• Victoria Chang’s prose-poetry collection Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief

The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing

Of the numerous profound wisdoms Mic Crenshaw shared with us at our last meeting, one thing he said early in the night stuck with me as a survivor of student activism and Lake Oswego’s racial gaslighting. “My best friends and I were doing the work when we were teenagers not because adults told us to, not because somebody invited us to an event or a meeting,” he says frankly, “but because we had to face the immediate threat to our existence that was in our community.” I think of the students today and how isolated they must feel after witnessing literally incomprehensible amounts of death genocide on their phones, only to be met with silence in the “real world.” What kind of future are we envisioning for our kids if we’re unwilling to even take accountability for creating both the silence and the genocide in the first place?

Censorship of student voice and student power is one of the most frequent examples of harm towards students today. As it goes, it’s easy to tell young people “I know more than you, so I won’t even promote your voice.” Considering “politics” as an isolated incident rather than a dialogue with which we are constantly using is immensely dangerous. It makes one believe there is a “before” and “after” to history, to violence. There is only now and then. And until then we still have time. As long as we’re still breathing, we always have a chance, if not a responsibility to do better.

After publishing a student magazine COLOR on our experience as people of color, Serena Lum, Barbara Chen and I experienced an outpour of support from peers, but ambivalence from administrators. We wrote the paper in the summer before our senior year as our attempt at verbalizing our racist encounters as Asian students in Lake Oswego and at showing solidarity for the Black Lives Matter Movement following its resurgence in mid-2020 due to public outcry over police-sanctioned murders. As Chen remembers in her recent Life After The Bubble interview, our then-Principal Rollin Dickinson likened us to “gangsters in pubs” for using specific radical rhetoric such as “ACAB” (spelling “All Cops Are Bastards”). He considered it so inappropriate that he was unwilling to mention our paper in his weekly newsletter, let alone amplify our voices and denounce racism in our schools by sharing any of our sentiments or mesages. He explained at one point that he was uncomfortable with the language since white supremacist skinheads in the UK in the ‘90s also adopted that language, but he failed to address the concerns of actual people of color using “ACAB” for their outcries against police brutality. 

One problem activists find themselves facing too often is semantics distracting from accomplishing anything–whether that means helping those who are most vulnerable, or criticizing those responsible for their subjugation. It’s hard enough when your peers barely even believe you about the racism, ableism, homophobia, etc. you experience, but to have administrators and leaders who you look up to dismiss you for something as superficial (and classist!) as rhetoric, it’s another layer of disbelief and loss. 

What Cathy Park Hong describes as “Minor Feelings” is the constant bombardment of racial microaggressions and following disbelief: “Did you just say that to me?” “Is this really happening?” “Are you not who I thought you were?”. Park Hong refers to them as “emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.” Park Hong addresses the frequent demand of people of color to put aside their minor feelings in favor of white comfort, white privilege, and “white living,” as Claudia Rankine describes. Minor Feelings happen all the time. It’s how I felt when Rollin Dickinson made those comments about our magazine. When the Lake Oswego Library has carceral policies that allow them to remove unhoused people (who are disproportionately BIPOC), or whoever is not deemed respectable enough to be in a public space. It’s what I experienced while watching the Lakeridge HS performance of Little Shop of Horrors this past fall. Sitting there in all my senseless liberal reboot disbelief, asking why a deeply racialized story of poor Jewish and Black people on Skid Row was suddenly so whitewashed. Even small situational moments of racism in the dialogue were erased, and all the previously BIPOC characters were ultimately played by white kids—yet they elected to keep the misogyny and abuse present in the original show? 

Though now I have language to describe these feelings, to see these intertextual connections, and I’m older, I can’t help but be angry. Nobody among friends, teachers, admin, or even my family protected me from the gaslighting capabilities of white supremacy! Nobody told me that it’s okay to be angry, spiteful, and even downright rageful at these oversights and injustices, big and small. Racism is inhumane. All oppression is. It’s okay to want to say “fuck you” to Rollin Dickinson, to all the people who either directly or indirectly failed me. It’s okay to be disappointed in their passivity, just as it’s okay to forgive them even if they don’t deserve it. We are not powerless to these not-so-minor feelings, and harnessing them just may be the key to restoring our truth, inner wisdom, and humanity.

There’s a beautiful thing happening on my Instagram feed right now. Though we are facing over 130 days of aggression in the genocide against Palestinians, over 20 days of state-wide blackout in Sudan, among many other global atrocities from Congo to Rwanda to Yemen, there is so much hope. Activists have addressed these current manifestations of colonization and the massive loss of humanity from those perpetuating harm by using the term “soul loss.” A translation of a spiritual phenomena believed in by Indigenous circles around the world, soul loss is meant to encapsulate the harm inflicted upon an individual after carrying out dehumanizing acts such as settler colonialism, racism, and oppression in all forms. This includes passivity or silence, such as seeking individualist relief from the discomfort that awakening and awareness brings. The account @breadxbutta on Instagram shared a post about the presence of Susto: 

In latinx cultures we use this term to describe a traumatic experience that ‘changed’ someone. This traumatic event does not even have to be one that was personally experienced by you. You could have Susto from being told about a happening, you could have been close enough in proximity to it, or in a lot of our situations, have seen images or videos of them. When we have susto, we are somatically trapping the experience in our bodies and losing a piece of our soul in that moment. In curanderismo and shamanism, this is called soul loss. We go through a traumatic experience or recount and can lose a piece of ourselves in that moment. This susto/ soul loss causes us to have weak energetic boundaries and even leaky boundaries. This leaves us more vulnerable to losing even more energy and being attacked on spiritual, mental, emotional and physical levels. Sickness can also begin to occur over time if we leave our soul scattered and in its place, hold grief/pain/trauma.

By inflicting violence, consciously or unconsciously, we lose empathy, intelligence, reasoning, hope, and even our souls. There is a misconception that there’s only power in oppressing others, but there is nothing human, nothing natural, about colonization, white supremacy, and even capitalism. Through recognizing soul loss, we can begin to repair the damage already done on us as global citizens. By bearing witness, we can heal ourselves and others. It is through community that we begin to process the trauma we’ve witnessed (and/or experienced) and can take accountability to prevent (and/or atone) for harming others. 

No one is going to apologize for not protecting me or my peers. No adult has, and I don’t expect them to. As we continue to talk about ending genocide in Gaza, Aaron Bushnell, Nex Benedict, dreams of liberation, and the billions of other stories out there who need our eyes, our hearts, and our souls, may we have the strength to listen. And the compassion to apologize when we are called upon. 

Whether or not you have ever watched an episode of RPDR, the popularity of RuPaul Charles is undeniable as a household name and one of the most famous drag queens of all time. Since the first season released in 2009, RPDR has gained millions of devoted fans spanning the globe. With increased viewership, key topics of gay marriage, HIV-awareness, transgender identity, drag bans, and instances of homophobia that queens have vocalized on the show have helped bring queerness to the public eye. Nevertheless, due both in part to RuPaul Charles’ personal assimilationist ideas of progress (he loves bootstrapping and fracking) and the showrunners’ brand deals and capitalist greed, RPDR has always been plagued with racism, sizeism, ableism, and other oppression-based harms.

Note: This essay will only scratch the surface of the culture of white-washing, bigotry, exploitation, and silencing found in the RPDR production, community, and fanbase. Any critiques are not intended to direct harm or hate to any specifically mentioned queens. Rather, the critiques aim to bring awareness to the larger scope of RPDR’s influence and the dangers of continued trends of avoiding accountability and reactionary cancel culture. This post was written during the ongoing genocide on Gaza, and recognizes the solidarity required to end Zionism alongside racism, capitalism, and other oppressions under white supremacy! ????This essay was originally published in a newsletter in early February, so does not account for later incidents over the course of Season 16, such as Nymphia Wind’s questionable Cantonese accent during the comedic, office presentation episode.

Typically, success in the RPDR-dominated drag industry is predicated on one’s ability to participate in or be a bystander to the collective cultural theft. This is far from traditions of drag, as “Ballroom” dance scenes began in warehouses in Chicago and New York in the 1920s coinciding with the Great Migration and Harlem Renaissance. Black and brown queens—who were often also femme, unhoused, addicted, “crazy,” and/or disabled—would come together to “walk” and compete in competitions for who could epitomize and satirize various icons and archetypes of the zeitgeist. Now, however, “drag” is much more broadly categorized and judged, with most popular media about drag being close in proximity to the aesthetics and morals of RPDR.

In a recent episode of RPDR (Season 16, episode 4: aired Jan. 26, 2024), the runway theme for the remaining 13 queens was “Night of A Thousand Chers” (aka “Everything Every Cher All the Time”), and showcased different eras and famous looks of Cher. Nymphia Wind’s and Sapphira Cristál’s outfits stuck out as examples of Cher’s well-documented racial appropriation to mixed reviews. Nymphia wore an orientalist “ancient Egyptian” Cher outfit and Sapphira donned a 2017 Vegas Cher with a full afro and elaborate neck piece.

Both queens were “safe” with their looks and performance for the wfeek, meaning they received no critiques from judges before being moved through to the next stage in the competition. Likewise, production made no comment on the show about Cher’s history of appropriation or the immense influence she had with her racial stereotyping. From what I could find, it seems the RPDR community at large had nothing to say about any of it either. (Upon posting preliminary questions about what people thought on the RPDR subreddit, people told me I was being dramatic and to “go touch grass” since the questions I raised weren’t purportedly real.)

What I find interesting is how both of these outfits portray a disingenuine version of Cher that, in some form, these queens resonated with enough to reclaim, or, in Nymphia’s case, continue to take from. Sapphira’s Cher outfit exhibits Black Excellence, a far cry from Cher’s actual ancestry (Armenian and Western European white) while Nymphia’s look feels costumey, even if the craftsmanship of both garments is unquestionably good.

AppRupriation and Cher, Continued:

In the previous Cher-styled challenge on RPDR “Cher: The Unauthorized Rusical” (Season 10, Episode 8), Monet X Change wore a Native American headdress for a “The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour” segment of the musical. The lyrics and costume reference Cher’s continuous history of theft, but unfortunately are written and performed under the guise of self awareness, anti-intellectualism and tasteless irony. It’s a pretty hard watch. For about a minute, Monet explains her ancestry and why that was okay for her to cosplay as Indigenous people, whether Native Americans or Roma people. The lyrics also include the g slur, “g*psy”. Then she dances around saying appropriation only happened “way back then” as if audiences weren’t witnessing it in real time on their televisions in May 2018. The portrayal of Cher’s appropriation is downplayed by a denial of the real harm brought on by stereotyping racially oppressed communities and is emphasized by the exploitative relationship RPDR has with pitting queens of color against one another while engaging in stereotype to be “funny” (well, at least for the judges and white imaginations…). Immediately following is a performance of Disco Era Cher by The Vixen, clad groovily in an afro.

What’s considerable is how this is just a bar for bar repetition of Nymphia and Sapphira now, but 6 years ago. Cher revivals initiate two outcomes: appropriation that either becomes subversive and reclamatory, or appropriation that’s basic and reductionist. In documented examples, Black queens reclaim ownership and pride over their natural hair while others (often also BIPOC) appropriate each other, whether that’s co-opting black-coded, textured hair or sacred headdresses.

More insights:

“Night of A Thousand [blank],” the event in question from the Cher runway theme, is inherently appropriative! Its name originates from “Arabian Nights” (aka “One Thousand And One Nights”) and the concept is simply recreating already-made, iconic outfits. Even RuPaul himself did not invent this runway theme. The earliest rendition of the event is “1000 Stevies” for Stevie Nicks which began in 1991 and continues annually. (Ironically the event page also celebrates her mis-use of Roma imagery for her aesthetic, also using the g slur.) So what is this runway theme offering that’s new outside of nostalgia and reference. It’s cute for the girls that get it but not for the ones who flop (ex. wearing a 1960s wig for a 1970s outfit ????). So how do we “queer” icons? Well, not by appropriating their racist appropriations!

How is the event contributing to the pop culture memory of a person just to recreate their greatest hits like a bad Beach Boys cover band? For instance, Season 14’s Kerri Colby wearing an exact off-the-runway Versace dress for “Night of A Thousand Jennifer Lopez’s” is not giving us anything new. It’s just aesthetically beautiful, boring, and not even necessarily “drag.” Additionally, Season 8’s “Night of A Thousand Madonnas” displayed four separate girls who wore the same red kimono for the runway. Not only were the looks cheap, but some were much more sexualized than even Madonna’s original music video look, adding to the orientalizing effect of the now-dubbed Kimonogate. After the fact, Season 8 winner Bob the Drag Queen revealed there were two more girls who had been eliminated who brought kimonos for this challenge, so that would’ve been six near-identical kimonos paying homage to dozens of other iconic, non-racist Madonna looks. (Unfortunately, even in the following season 9’s attempt at Ru-demption, “Night of A Thousand Madonnas, part two” [aka “Kimono She Better Don’t”], two pairs of queens ended up wearing variations of the same look. So that’s six kimonos, two Met Gala flannels, two Material Girls, and one Madonna, oh my…)

How does this keep happening?

Is the idea of appropriation too alluring for some people that it must inherently be racialized? Imagine how ecstatic one must feel to courageously wear one of the few questionable looks by a known gay icon—resident straight, probably white woman—for the gay competition of your generation, only to face a rude awakening to the uncreativity of one’s choices. Nevertheless, such rude awakening never occurs on RPDR. One of the most universally celebrated fashion queens, Season 3 winner Raja wore a crude-couture version of a Native headdress and was met gloriously by the judges feedback. One of them even made a holler of excitement saying “Nava-ho!”.

Not to mention, the “lip sync for your life” song in the Cher-tastic season 16 episode was Cher’s “Dark Lady,” which heavily relies on stereotypes of Romani people as mystical, foreign and hyper-sexualized. It, again, uses the g slur. Like, I guess this is better than including another anti-indigenous Cher anthem (like her most famous “Half Breed” in which she appropriates not only Native identity but uses slurs that aren’t hers!), but could they not have used any of Cher’s other non-racist songs?! 

Unfortunately, even when RPDR has the clearest opportunity to be a platform for queer liberation, education, or even simply “awareness,” they choose not to. For example, first indigenous winner of DR Canada, Métis member Venus won a design challenge few weeks ago (Jan 2024) and guest judge Batchewana First Nation member Sarain Fox commented on how important it was that Venus wore a red dress—referencing REDress Project. Either Fox, the other hosts, or the showrunners didn’t include any further info or even mention of the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women and two spirit people. It’s unfortunate that the “that’s enough activism for today” bar is so low that the mere mention of a symbol alluding to the awareness of an international issue was enough for RPDR production and fans alike. In a later instagram post, Venus thanked Fox for her insight and shared resources and information about the significance about the Red Dress Day and details about how folks can donate to a specific nonprofit org she included. Still, she’s a very small creator even after winning the crown. Despite her win, she only has about 74k followers at time of posting, paltry compared to the almost 5 million and 3.6 million who follow RuPaul and RPDR’s instagram, respectively.

To conclude, although Sapphira managed to create an entirely new feeling and resonance with her Cher look, Nymphia’s embodies the obtuse essence of Cher and her similarly daft appropriation of cultural aesthetics.

While RPDR remains a platform for queer voices, it relies upon the mutual participation of white and BIPOC in cultural appropriation in order to maintain empty entertainment for audiences. Thus, the only “representation” the show deems valid is one of consumptive exploitation, wherein audiences, contestants and hosts alike convey references to cultural and ancestral symbols, without any of the substance of why those symbols offer value, joy, and/or history. The symbols themselves may be mundane or commonplace, or they may be spiritual and ceremonial. Regardless of their nature, their mere reference and the exchange of their ownership is what’s valuable. What’s worse is that RPDR has a kind of fanfare over The Reference, where one may garner greater success and notoriety for the ability to demonstrate a fluency in the language of pop cultural appropriation. And because of the impact Black Culture has on pop culture, often identity and racialization are inherently included in that ball pit of “exchange.”

Regardless of their intent, the theft of these items, aesthetics, or cultural knowledge for the sake of visual reference is dangerous, crude, and unimaginative. As drag takes so much influence from Ballroom Culture, it’s only fitting that we return to those values of form and subversion that once pioneered drag and other queer art. So to those of you still asking “what is Drag Race without reference?”, perhaps instead we should ask “how much better could drag become, for everyone, with imagination, curiosity, and appreciation?”.

Carefully unpessimistic,

c.r.i.

Resources on appropriation that informed this essay:

• Hanif Abdurraqib’s essay “Sixteen Ways of Looking at Blackface”
• Andrea Long Chu’s essay “Ottessa Moshfegh is Praying For Us”
• Cathy Park Hong’s essay collection Minor Feelings
• Claudia Rankine’s prose-poetry collection Citizen
• Princess Weekes’ video essay “No—Twilight Hate Isn’t Just Misogyny”