How the ruling class is consolidated
And how they find it so easy to watch as Gaza burns.
What follows is transcribed from a powerful tiktok by a recent Harvard Law grad, Rachel Cohen, that describes in great detail how the elites of the US are able to coolly stand by as people suffer in preventable ways, especially in Gaza.
The video of Elizabeth Warren at a restaurant being confronted by a Gazan refugee, particularly the way it ends when somebody says "I don't think this is the place for this." ties together a lot of thoughts that I have about institutions and respectability politics. [I've] talked about this a little bit before because I went to Harvard Law School. Elizabeth Warren's husband who's in the video was actually my property professor. And I was at Harvard when the Dobbs opinion leaked overturning Roe vs. Wade and the campus's reaction to that really solidified a lot of thoughts I already had around how frustrating I found it that pretty much everything that we talked about was considered an academic exercise from mass incarceration to Roe being overturned and that it was really important that we give air time to people who had opposing views on these issues, despite the fact that a lot of the time when people were talking about mass incarceration and felt very strongly about it, it was because their family had a history with the criminal legal system and when people were pro mass incarceration it was usually because they were racist. Gotta give air time to both sides!
But specifically what [Roe] being overturned kind of highlighted for me was that because on campus we had this idea that we had this wide range of opinions and backgrounds and because so often people on the right were making their arguments through an entirely academic lens, because had they ever been in a situation where, for example, one of their family members or they themselves had needed an abortion and been unable to get one and had died because of that, they would not be anti-abortion. People on the right are pretty much always approaching these conversations through this very academic, theoretical lens. Not always, but very common. And then when you had people who were discussing these things through a lens of personal experience, they were often accused of being too close to the issue or being personally biased or at some point people were told that they couldn't use personal experience because that was too hard to argue with. [knowing, dramatic pause]. But then when you had people on the left who were arguing not from personal experience, when you had people arguing through theoretical lenses, that removed the very human element of the impact of these discussions entirely.
But something I also realized is that even when you had people who were talking based off personal experience or based off ways that policies might impact them personally, so let's use Dobbs as an example. Once you access these particular halls of power, once you make it onto these campuses, even if policies might theoretically impact you or have impacted you in the past, the ways in which they impact you change a lot because of your access and proximity to wealth and power. So for example, when I was talking about Dobbs, despite the fact that I grew up in a state where it looked, briefly, like abortion would be criminalized, it was easy to internalize me talking about it as me being the person that was the most impacted by this policy, me being kind of a representative of the ways in which these policies were impacting very real people.
And if I am the person that is impacted by your policy, it's very easy to dismiss that as a very real tragedy if you're sitting across from me at the table having this conversation because I have a Harvard Law degree and so I am always going to have the wealth and connections to leave a place where abortion is criminalized and access one if I need to. I realized that when I was arguing with people on the right, they thought that I was the person that was being impacted. They came to think of their classmates who had any type of personal experience or held any type of identity that might be impacted by the policies that we were discussing as their opposition. To a certain extent that's true but the actual people that are being impacted are the people that don't have Harvard Law degrees. And the people on the right at places like Harvard, the people on the right in the US senate, which is turning out to apparently be all of them, they are running in spaces where they are almost never if ever going to be confronted by the people who their policies are actually harming without recourse. Someone who is currently in Gaza, that girl's relatives who are currently being bombed in Gaza, cannot walk up to Elizabeth Warren in a restaurant and ask why she's not calling for a ceasefire. Someone who can't afford access to abortion is not going to walk onto Harvard Law School's campus and sit down and engage in an argument with someone about Dobbs.
And so not only are people never confronted by the actual harm that they are causing, which makes it then easier to view these discussions as academic exercises, as things that are occurring in vacuums. They also, I think, start to internalize the idea that these policies aren't actually that bad because the people that they see talking about and critiquing them, opposite them, have massive amounts of agency to avoid the impacts of these policies themselves. And so it starts to feel, I think, like these policies don't actually impact real people because they don't impact people that ever share space with those making said policies.
And I've been thinking about the absurdity of saying that dinner isn't the appropriate place to confront Elizabeth Warren about why she, as supposedly one of the most progressive members of the senate, isn't calling for a ceasefire when no one is answering phones. No one is responding to demonstrations or reacting when people go through the channels that are not confronting Elizabeth Warren at dinner. The absurdity of thinking that someone who willingly stepped into this role as an elected representative is entitled to peace while they are not intervening in the death of now over 11,000 people in Gaza, done using US weapons, US military aid, US support. And the ways in which we allow people who hold power to almost pretend that they don't, to pretend that their power is just an academic exercise, a theoretical exercise and something that they should be able to shed at the end of the day.
Don't let them.
It makes me think of this poem. It's called "Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying" (by Noor Hindi)
Colonizers write about flowers. I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks seconds before becoming daisies. I want to be like those poets who care about the moon. Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons. It’s so beautiful, the moon. They’re so beautiful, the flowers. I pick flowers for my dead father when I’m sad. He watches Al Jazeera all day. I wish Jessica would stop texting me Happy Ramadan. I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies. Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound. When I die, I promise to haunt you forever. One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.~~~~
This isn't theory. Many of the people who are in the rooms are being directly impacted by what's happening but the people who are bearing the strongest consequences of what's happening are not and definitionally cannot be in the room. And it is on us and our capacity for empathy to recognize that just because they aren't in the room, just because the people who are getting bombed are not at a restaurant in Massachusetts, that that doesn't make what's happening to them any less urgent and it doesn't make it any less tangible and real.
