BLOG #06: ACKNOWLEDGING IS THE LEAST YOU CAN DO, AND YOU CAN'T EVEN DO THAT RIGHT

Last Wednesday, my friend Ricky aka YATTA (great mind and musician as well as a perfect peer in the r*****g group we are both a part of) invited me to a talk at Bard University’s graduate center given by podcaster and journalist Avery Trufelman, a friend of theirs. It was originally supposed to be about dressing weird and then was switched a couple days before to a topic centering devotional clothing, which felt equally cool. 

That day, I had to write two things, put a purse in the mail to be repaired by Louis Vuitton, go to my Professional, and go to Sephora all before the talk. I’ve not worn makeup in threeish years and have been quite vocal about it because it feels good to not have anything smearing on your face and I really want people to join me, but a couple days earlier, a trusted advisor told me that wearing makeup is how she gets out of bed in the morning, and I felt so desperate to feel something that I didn’t even think to myself Wow, that’s sad, I even though I knew that we both were. This entire paragraph is just me pre-empting next year when I say, ‘Yeah I wore makeup for, like, two months but they don’t count,’ to justify claiming fourish years makeup-free. Anyways. 

I get to the talk, there’s new makeup in my purse, I’m soaking wet even though at one point it was only raining in 30% of New York City, but somehow the clouds followed me from my house to Brooklyn Heights to Flatiron to Upper West Side at the Bard building, where, apparently, there was also a coat check that no one told me about until after I dripped on everything. Text from Ricky, they’re late and sitting in the back. A little white girl with a pixie cut and pants that didn’t fit came up to introduce Avery, first beginning with a special thanks to the program, and then the guys who run the building we’re sitting in, and then, speaking of the building we were in... Oh god. 

I would like to take the time to acknowledge that we are currently gathering on the traditional lands of the Lenapehoking tribe...

I can’t help but roll my eyes drastically when she mispronounces Lenapehoking. Not because she somehow should know how to pronounce the tribe, but because she has to, in a room full of the kinds of people who attend academic talks in their free time, remind us that colonization is weird as a part of what I can only assume is a university-wide initiative. Agents of the institution, I think. Name 5 songs by Lenapehoking or you’re a fake fan.

Avery’s talk is great and centers how clothing, worship, and meaning come together in religious vestige but also the act of getting dressed in general—it’s funny, historical, remarkably researched, involved a mini zine-making tutorial at the beginning and also included live incantations (I’m not explaining this well you honestly had to be there). I even told her after Ricky introduced us post-talk that her work reminds me of the greatest structural and research-based parts of The Rachel Maddow Show, to which she threw her head back and laughed. Gas. 

But I couldn’t get the botched land acknowledgement out of my head. My unfiltered feelings: what does acknowledging the colonial history do other than make white people feel good? They say that acknowledgement is the first step to revolutionary action and yet it feels like we stop at the acknowledgement. What’s the point, other than signaling to others just like you—just as unwilling to do anything other than talk about how important it is to encourage people to do something, just as defensive, just as anxious—that you all agree with the fact that colonialism is bad? When you point that out, suddenly you “don’t know what you’re talking about,” “acknowledgment is the first step,” and other vaguely AA-sounding rhetoric. It’s confusing to see so many people proudly doing nothing and judging people who don’t do the same kind of nothing because they believe their nothing is actually just the “first step” towards maybe inspiring something real to happen. 

The first step...toward what? I know revolutionary thinkers who have actually decolonized their minds, who actually want to see the destruction of city life as we know it in favor of a more equitable solution. That solution, that place, might resemble the New York we know, it might be radically different. They accept a change that is non-linear, that happens through listening, insight, and action. There is no expectation to have all the wonders of modern capitalist life while seeing the success of land back initiatives. And this is what pisses me off the most about land acknowledgements. It feels like this kind of language is an anxiety response from people who—upon learning about how widespread oppression is along with its material effects on society, typically at the higher educational level—can’t interpret this realization as perspective or appreciation for what they have that others may not. Instead they feel so guilty that the learning stops there, and words hollow themselves out to contain the anxiety. They have to do something if they felt as passionately as they posture. But, they just say a whole bunch of things instead cus, you know, same thing? The emptiness of these land acknowledgments with neither a call to action nor even a real message coupled with the caginess of the people blurting them feels part and parcel to actual anxiety symptoms: you get an idea in your head based on low self-image, you get mad when people question its validity, you defend your rumination and condemn everyone else. The cake is had and also eaten.

I don’t like to share this opinion because without context and the necessary time to relay that context, the above too closely resembles a lot of right-wing gripes toward equity and DEI, which is not where I align. It is important to understand the colonial histories behind America and how they are reflected in current laws and restrictions that actively target minorities. It is also important to understand that land reclamation is radical, not in that the idea is impossible or implausible, but that it requires a shift in the way life is set up for a lot of us. It’s not an ideology to dip your toe in just to signal other academics at a talk about fashion that you’ve checked your privilege, and are up to date on the activism du jour. 

+++

Waiting in line at Public Records on a Friday night with my friends David and Mo and my best friend Kima. One of my roommates’ boyfriends had freelanced there a bit and mentioned that the crowd was ruining the joint, which I didn’t take seriously until looking at the line of ticket holders, an array of 20somethings in tops that could be considered “cute” and light wash jeans that didn’t fit, men douchey with wandering eyes. There are so many natural blondes that it aesthetically off-set the Brooklyn demographic, even in Boerum Hill. Inside the club felt like how 1 Oak and The Public Hotel used to feel as an underclassman, not like how Public Records used to feel four, five years ago. My friends watch me scrounge for spare cigarettes (ran out before leaving the crib, no re-entry so no deli-run) and stand to receive my second hand smoke near the outdoor heaters. We are people watching. Everyone here is like a walking land acknowledgement. Empty, appreciative to be in what they misidentify as a cutty Brooklyn haunt for “heads,” misinformed, poorly dressed, disrespectful to staff and minorities; two guys shoulder-checked Kima and after my brief words of protest (I pointed at them and said ‘No, uh-uh’) one of them told me to “grow up.”

At a little table killing time before Benji B, the DJ we came for in the first place, Kima shows me a list of words Trump is banning from federal communications on her phone. Our absurd favorites were “female” (but not male), “victim/s,” and, funny enough, “Black.” Of course, a presidential administration cannot ban words, at least not effectively. There are a lot of questions that arise from the ban in general: while the second Trump administration seeks to remove the words on this list from federal usage, how far will it go? Will there be a literal word police to stop people from saying the words on the list? Will the existing database where you can find former federal documentation (if you didn’t know, all governmental information on bills and laws that affect we citizens are public access) be redacted should those words appear? Is this serious as a “first step” in the Trump administration’s crusade against DEI, and what’s the next step? Book burning, wider-spread restrictions on mainstream media that disagrees with the president’s beliefs? What even are those beliefs? Kima and I laugh in a dystopian way because we’re not irony-poisoned, but we are scared, but not spooked; on notice, but not paranoid. This edict is a message from this White House administration that our problems, and the problems of other minorities in the US, are not to be talked about or even alluded to in language. Obviously, this is a problem. 

There are some words on the list that I wish would disappear federal communications, not because I agree with the Trump administration’s push toward censorship (ironic, given that the right loves to champion the First Amendment which included the right to free speech), but because words and phrases like “accessibility” and “diversity” and “unconscious bias” are thrown around by the government in manner I feel resembles the passive land acknowledgement. Remember when Congressional Democrats donned Kente cloth and took a Colin Kaepernick knee for eight minutes to honor George Floyd? That’s what the overuse of those words feels like. What could be language of a call to action, of considered efforts toward real acknowledgement of unconscious bias, real bills and laws to re-order society so it promotes more accessibility and diversity, becomes a placeholder for caring a whole bunch rather than doing a whole bunch. The people who should be doing a whole bunch are up there (the government). Citizens have demanded, and we know we cannot be heard unless there is a shakeup to what we consider “order.” In the mean time, people like me don’t want to hear a bunch of word salad, we want words to mean something, and to be used to educate people on where society fails, and maybe, hopefully, even inspire people to think about what that something could be. My critical read of the Trump administrations’s banned word list is that it signifies anti-word salad and may even sway people to agree because of their hatred of phrases like “accessibility,” but in practice, will further disenfranchise us all. 

Kima and I come to a condensed version of this point before heading to the dancefloor with David and Mo—Benji B is finally on though it’s 1:45am and both the flyer for the evening and Benji’s personal Instagram advertised an that he’d be spinning 11 to 4. It’s an endurance game by way of bouncy two-step and occasional ass wiggling for the rest of the night, until we pile in David’s car at 4ish for chopped cheese before drop offs. In bed, yellow Gatorade and greasy sandwich in tow, my mind toes the line between language and action. When language no longer means anything, the true meaning or moral imperative or purpose of any action dissolves. That’s why people take Trump’s list of no-no words as a “right on, own the Libs” action when in reality, it poses a major threat to the already flawed state of democracy here in the US. In many ways, we’ve stopped meaning what we say a long time ago, with well-intentioned efforts like land acknowledgments becoming more of a social profiling tool to identify who stands with or against you, rather than a means of educating people of colonial histories that we are not taught about in most schools to the extent that I think we should. Will we ever say anything and mean it again, or is that a concept of yore?

The rest of this weekend, I’ve been thinking of solutionism, the tech-world term for the idea that any problem has a solution and that those solutions will typically be achieved by technology. There’s an easy connection to be made between this concept and Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, in that such fixation on goal orientation not only becomes moot, but counterintuitive (of course, I’m paraphrasing; if you somehow haven’t read the book you really should). The land acknowledgement and the banned word list as solutions inspire a set-goal-work-to-achieve-goal-reach-goal system that cycles infinitely as if there is a solution to be reached. What is that solution, and what would/could it look like? The very idea of a solution is limiting in its singularity, in the same way a lot of “progressive” politics can feel more like hamster wheels of labor to reach a far-off perfect that some guy in a suit invented than actual, gradual change that helps people in a broader sense. Change is not linear, and I don’t think it can be assigned or oriented as a goal to reach one day. Progress doesn’t start anywhere, not with a land acknowledgement or a banned list of words. It happens, if we care enough to figure out how to make it happen, together. 

I’ve changed so much in the nearly 9 years I’ve lived in New York and the most drastic developments happened when I wasn’t pathologically searching for them. Unfortunately, I am a Zillennial (born before 9/11 but can’t remember it, social media became cool towards the end of middle school rather than elementary) so pathology is kind of unavoidable. Here I am and will be until I change again, on an endless quest to understanding what the fuck is going on.