Repression Is Not A Brand

Some months back, I got a letter from the Virginia Department of Taxation.  I’d been receiving letters from the Department for a while.  Normally I put them in a pile on the kitchen counter and went on my way.  I don’t know what compelled me to open this particular letter, but I immediately regretted it.  Inside was a bill for back taxes in excess of $72,000. 

How I came to be in arrears in an amount greater than my net worth is a complicated story.  The short version is that I won a large court settlement in 2016 while I worked in Beirut and three years later Virginia, where I no longer resided at the time, decided I need to pay state tax (and tens of thousands in penalties) on that settlement.  I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was a setup.  Virginia had informed us that it was acting on information from the IRS.  For years, the IRS has been extracting back taxes, in multiples of many thousands, citing various statutes beyond our comprehension.  The organization is devastatingly efficient.  It has a way of letting you know that security is ephemeral.  Becoming whole through remuneration is a myth.  And court settlements are never as lush as they seem. 

We consulted numerous accountants and lawyers before and after filing taxes.  Still, the bills kept coming.  It didn’t seem accidental. 

When the IRS unleashed the state of Virginia on us, it was a terrifying prospect.  We faced a future of permanent debt.  It produced a special kind of stress, the same kind that inspires people to engage in what prudish pundits like to call “looting.”  (Looting is basically just a form of extraction unauthorized by the ruling class.)  We spent hours trying to uncover sources of money.  We considered declaring bankruptcy. We made plans to flee the country.  The problem wasn’t something to discuss publicly.  We bore the stress in private conversation. 

Even if the tax-masters could cite this or that regulation (and can’t the authorities always cite reasons for their bullishness?), the impression of being targeted was acute.  We simply didn’t know.  That’s the upshot of vulnerability:  not knowing is a severe political disadvantage made worse by emotional responses to incomprehensible stimuli.  We hired a lawyer who eventually compelled Virginia to retract its claim.  The message nevertheless remains:  we can make you indigent in the amount of time it takes to write a letter. 

The tax problem compounded plenty of unpleasant professional experiences that unfolded in full view of the public.  These events are documented in news stories and legal proceedings, but unseen are the sleepless nights of hotboxing cigarettes, wishing the lump of abdominal dread would go away.  The pain of feeling like a failed provider and in turn an inadequate parent.  The association of a tribal name in Jordan with incivility.  The tortured decisions about what’s best for the movement.  The candid exploration of suicide. 

Then there are the lawsuits filed against me by the same forces responsible for the destruction of my academic career.  Time.  Expense.  Anxiety.  Each the ultimate point.  The oppressor wins by virtue of the victim’s sentience.  I rarely venture into public, but when I do, the Zionist braintrust, ever on guard for a comeback, is sure to kick up a fuss.  I discuss the oppressor so often because he is affixed to every feature of my existence. 

There’s nothing romantic about persecution, whether mild or catastrophic.  It makes a person feel one step from destitution, at least among those lucky enough not to have become destitute already.  Performing anxiety in front of strangers as a way to derive credentials (usually in the absence of accomplishment) isn’t something most victims of actual repression want to do. 

A friend who had been fired from a high-profile gig for criticizing Israel confided in me that the experience was humiliating.  The reaction tracks with my experience.  To this day, I feel shame from my moment of infamy.  I don’t see the repression I suffer as anything to crow about.  There is honor in having been fired and sued and overtaxed and then returning to assert the vitality of freedom.  Transforming that history into a bid for cheap attention undermines the dignity of perseverance. 

My experiences are minor relative to more unfortunate targets of the ruling class.  For decades, Black and Indigenous activists have suffered assassination and imprisonment.  Just this month, cops gunned down Breonna Taylor in her own home and choked George Floyd to death.  Ramsey Orta was hounded into prison by the NYPD as reprisal for filming their murder of Eric Garner.  Entire graveyards and detention centers testify to the brutality of the U.S. government.  

I’ve also been fortunate relative to peers in the Palestine solidarity community.  I think often of the time Sami Al-Arian and Rasmea Odeh spent in prison before their expulsion from the United States.  I also recall that Al-Arian never preened in front of cameras as a heroic talisman and that Odeh’s uncompromising generosity matches the intensity of her politics.  How easy it is to dispose of them, though, once the cameras swing in another direction.  

Without the ability to distinguish hucksters from victims, you’re being set up to miss the point, or to expedite social climbing under the guise of principle.  When Al-Arian’s children discuss their father’s prosecution and job termination, the pain of the ordeal is obvious.  It’s a rare but powerful discourse, without any goofy, over-affected bullshit.  

Fake repression generally arises in two incarnations:  there are the reactionary twits who become celebrities for challenging “political correctness” or “social justice warriors” or “cancel culture.”  This type will say something stupid—almost always tacitly racist or sexist—face some pushback, tack right, and then become free-speech icons among people who think Steven Pinker is insightful.  Then there are self-described leftists who invite repression as a form of brand equity.  This type turns every normal inconvenience of public life into a circus.  They’re always into some kind of drama.  They tend to be upper-class, or aspire to the upper-class, and in fact are performing the loyalties required for such access.  (And, as their acolytes figure out the hard way, these people are a pain in the ass to deal with.) 

A habit of both variations is to conceptualize disagreement with people they view as beneath them as a dreadful indignity.  (It’s a primary motif of blue-check Twitter.)  Here they confuse unauthorized speech, the language of marginalization, with an infringement on the divine right to bloviate without repudiation. 

Distinguishing persecution from playacting is simple.  You need only observe a few questions:  does the so-called repression generate outrage from politicians and administrators?  Does it increase the supposed victim’s social standing?  Does that victim become a corporate media darling?  Is an academic gig or think tank appointment on offer?  If yes, then you’re not dealing with a rebel, but with a media culture that loves to compensate self-regard. 

Pay attention to subject matter.  When I was asked to discuss my repression, I always brought focus to Palestine, to American Indian Studies, to structural racism, to sexual violence, to the precariousness of adjunct labor.  Whom does an act of speech compel you to think about?  The speaker or the human beings actually suffering the brunt of state violence?  When Zionists complain about an event in which I’m involved, my hosts will kindly ask, “What should we do about it?”  I tell them to do nothing.  Let the Zionists stamp their feet.  I’m coming for one reason:  to accumulate contempt and decimate their ideology, the only response they deserve, and one that honors my Palestinian brethren. 

Why does any of this matter?  Because watching loudmouths dominate airspace with fanciful stories of bravery is an insult to people who suffer actual repression.  Because those loudmouths transform struggle into mockery.  Because repression-as-branding reifies individualism.  Because audiences confuse social climbing with politics.  Because the ruling class facilitates this culture of vanity.  Because wannabe-somebodies will always coopt a movement amenable to celebrity. 

Consumption isn’t a neutral phenomenon.  We ought to consider how we consume and reproduce information.  Reading choices are themselves a form of politics.  Sharing content even more so.  It’s important to align consumption with a greater political vision, one that attempts to recover forms of life we’re meant to forget.  

Three weeks into widespread protest against anti-Black state violence, we are witnessing the deadly toll of repression and the unrest it inspires among millions of people.  There’s a peculiar energy in the atmosphere that mixes fatigue and purpose, and that manages to appear both spontaneous and deliberate.  Being unable to breathe—at once a literal condemnation of police brutality and a brutal metaphor for life under capitalism—is the basis for today’s urgency, for the insistence that normal procedures are inadequate to the task of liberation.  And all of it amid a virus that attacks the respiratory system. 

How will the ruling class mitigate or absorb this insurgent energy?  As usual, with a combination of brute force, infiltration, propaganda, dialogue, cosmetic legislation, grandstanding, coercion, and appeals to an exceptional national character.  A common tactic is to elevate handpicked activists into positions of prominence so as to create a pretext for continued inequality under the guise of concern.  If insurgency offers the only possibility for justice, then reform can strike the body of the oppressed with the force of a baton. 

Those who transform repression into a parade of self-reference aren’t simply insincere or childish; they allow themselves to be conscripted into a culture of individualism for professional rewards.  That’s why it matters when pundits and influencers treat repression as an opportunity, because they join supposed antagonists in extracting from the dispossessed.  These are people who combine the passion of a narcissist with the instinct of a hypochondriac. 

As protest continues, consider that prudent consumption makes its own contribution to movements for justice.  The real victims of repression are people you’ve never heard of, people who almost certainly don’t want their pain transformed into spectacle, decontextualized from the forces that cause them harm.  Be wary of the travails of upper-class content producers who always manage to find mainstream outlets for their complaint.  Their purpose isn’t to represent the persecuted, but to convert persecution into a career mediated by forces of reaction.  The only names we need to hear right now belong to human beings killed or imprisoned by the police state we’re trying to subvert.