On days like today, the headlines stack themselves against me.
“Man Dies on Subway After Another Rider Places Him in Chokehold”
“Good Samaritan Stops T.J. Maxx Shoplifter”
I get thrown into a particular emotional arc. I am taken up by too familiar a choreography. Something rises in me and that something wants to see a public acknowledgment of what these daily headlines reveal of the incessant, even mundane, daily violence directed at black people. This something that rises is visceral. It wants to go outside and bite someone. Or hit them with a brick. It wants an equally violent response to this violence. It isn’t civil. It isn’t about a civil society. It laughs at my own notions of civil society. It wants to bite someone. At the very very least, it wants to see a riot, a fight, or some other kind of confrontational public outrage.
I wait for this confrontation only to realize it’s not going to happen. I feel empty. I hide my teeth and put down my brick. I pull it together and try to keep producing, working, carrying on. And then comes this glitch-in-the-matrix feeling of how often I’ve felt this exact set of feelings. Then comes the weariness of how often I’ve been practiced into this choreography of putting away my teeth and my brick and my hopes for commensurate violence. I’m tired of the dance. I’m tired of (and tired from) wanting a confrontation that doesn’t come.
So I ask myself, what stops outraged people from going out, from finding one another, from expressing the mighty outrage? What keeps us staying to ourselves, a set of disconnected actors who feel the moment but can seemingly make no next moves? What keeps us in our chairs? What has us close the tab with the headlines and turn our attention right back to our productive lives?
I find myself wondering whether the seemingly obvious desire to meet violence with confrontation is part of what keeps us disparate, immobilized? What if this tactic long ago ceded its capacities to interrupt and folded itself quietly into the pattern called more of the same?
If we are unable or unwilling to meet violence with the scale of violence that it demands, what if instead I listen to this empty feeling and amplify it? What if we meet violence with a vacuum? What if that is what it takes to throw the system off balance? I consider the subversive energies of quiet quitting, of Nap Ministries, of the anti-hero Bartleby (who maddens his employer with his response to every request, “I would prefer not to.”) Could these be the beginnings of practices of radical withdrawal?
What if along with laying down my brick, I also lay down my calendar, my laptop, my dutiful participation in capitalist life--even in the work I do to challenge it? How do we recognize when a collective pulling back from the world is the needed cultural tactic?
Affectively, I am not convinced. My body yearns for a fight. My mind tells my hands to reach for my laptop, to produce, even this paper. I bargain with myself. Maybe during the vacuum, maybe in the stepping back time of withdrawal, I will be stacking bricks.
