What does it mean to be a citizen? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as I watch the US support Israel’s genocide in Gaza. I find myself considering my complicity in the deaths of more than 30,000 people. How many bullets did I buy for snipers? How many bombs did I contribute to? How many times do I have to call my representative to see any change in his position? Who does he (and the rest of our government officials) actually represent? And what does it mean that a fellow white man and soldier of empire would rather set himself on fire than continue to be complicit in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza?
This empire I call home has asked me to adopt a particular understanding of who belongs and who does not. That perspective is baked into all of the projects of empire. I see it in the disproportionate murder of Black people by police and in the murder of a nonbinary kid at school and in the book bans across the country and in the “build the wall” chants at Trump rallies and in the family separation policy that the so-called Department of Homeland Security has implemented and in the foreign policy that refuses to acknowledge an active genocide being committed by Israel.
These rules of belonging become part of the air we breathe. We internalize them and are expected to accept the hierarchy of who’s worthy of being a citizen and who isn’t. Once we are trained on the rules of the empire, as white men we are expected to become enforcers alongside the police, border patrol and other state agencies. We’ve come to believe we belong here without question and that anyone who isn’t white, cisgender male, heterosexual, or presenting particular cues of their class background must be an outsider. We enforce this by asking people to prove they belong because we’ve been trained that they don’t.
If something seems out of the ordinary, we report it or take it into our own hands. We see this in the vigilante murders of Ahmaud Arbery and Trayvon Martin and Jordan Neely and Jordan Davis and Wadea Al Fayoume and Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha. Our country, this empire, asks us to enforce this hierarchy or face the consequences of social exclusion and the true cancel culture: the right-wing’s doxxing, book banning, violence, and intimidation. The American empire asks us to enforce hierarchy globally by looking the other way when we send munitions to a military that targets civilians and cuts off humanitarian aid. We must shut our mouths and accept the murder of 30,000 people. We must hold our noses and vote for a President who has not wavered in his support for a genocidal authoritarian Israeli government that is responsible for the death of Gazans. When we support a military that kills people waiting for meager rations, we reinscribe a global hierarchy that the American empire began with the genocides of Africans and Indigenous People.
Our work in OWMCL has been centered on understanding these rules of empire, how they appear in white men, how we can unlearn those rules, and how we can build a world beyond what we’ve always known. And while these invitations may not be enough for this moment, we invite you to Internal Liberation, the Reading Circle, the Abolition Sewing Circle, cohort gatherings, and to actions you can take with organizations across the movement, such as demanding a lasting ceasefire. These gatherings are our contribution to building the world we need.
We must continue to reflect on what this empire has asked us to do and how we can reject those conscriptions and instead fight for the world we all deserve. This work we do on behalf of empire affects us, too. We’re not free. We’re bound to the rules of a white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal empire. Those rules and our role in enforcing them take their toll on our personal humanity and we receive fewer public goods and services because our American Empire remains dedicated to imperial, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. We have no problem funding more cops and more defense contractors rather than funding health care or education. We can get free when we join with those whom this empire labels outsiders and less-thans. Together we can build a world that meets our collective needs, one where we all can thrive.
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