Barx [none/use name]

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: May 20th, 2024

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  • I know of local Palestinian women that vote shame for Harris. They have undermined various attempts at engaging in more militant coalition actions and rely exactly on this kind of logic: “we are Palestinian, you should do what we say, you are [white, asian, brown] and should not have a voice in this decision”.

    It is important to flip our understanding of identity away from how it is used (in a tokenizing way) by liberals. Solidarity requires that we investigate and understand, and this will require listening to people of a given demographic or nationality and developing ourselves and our organizations accordingly. If we do a good job, we should be able to recruit people falling into that bucket into our own orgs or otherwise be in coalition with them where they are in other radical (but not liberal) orgs. An org must embed in community to the extent possible and use this embedding to create relevant actions and education for building our collective power. A lack of people from X demographic is a suggestion that this may not be happening, though there may be good reasons for this (e.g. there may be literally two people from Sudan in your town, who says either of them must be interested in the left?).

    In addition, this line of thought (“listen to Palestinian women”) has a consequence of inaccurately flattening a large and diverse group of people. I also know Palestinian women that hate Harris, both liberal and anarchist and socialist women. Some of those women are critical of bourgeoia electoralism itself. So one must ask, “which Palestinian women should we listen to?”, because they disagree with one another about many things. In addition, this line of logic will inevitably invite a a critique of what it means to be Palestinian. I don’t think it is a coincidence that the particularly disruptive liberal Palestinian women I’m thinking of have been in the US since they were children and are vaguely PMC. Nor that the most radical Palestinian women are more recent immigrants in more diverse employment. It’s best not to even have those discussions most of the time, though.

    Instead, we should bring a strong understanding and develop the organizing skills to work towards our goals. Skills like organizing groups to form lines and leveraging cogent rhetoric. And, of course, do what we can to authentically embed in community. To be a trusted quantity.