This Country Is Still That Country, Continued

A few more thoughts about what I learned as an activist in ACT UP 35 years ago that has stayed true.

By some beautiful coincidence, and by that I mean, the thoughtful planning of colleagues, I was able to see Claudia Rankine present the 2024 Annual Hoffman Lecture here at Dartmouth, “For Reel, For Real: New Approaches to (Auto)biography”. The talk was on new methods for documenting “the poetics of being,” and how some “modes of (auto)biographical practice recapture the complexities of lives that have been flattened by narratives framed by historical trauma.” Many of us there, if not all of us, needed this.

I took some notes and am still processing the talk. I keep thinking of an answer she gave to a question. Someone had asked how she keeps writing in the face of tremendous state violence, and she said, approximately, “I just stay focused on my obsessions.” And then explained that the talk she’d just given was the result of those obsessions. It was interesting to think of that answer, a somewhat common one in one context, changed by this context. The idea that my obsessions might protect me in any way was revelatory.

I bought a copy of her book Just Us, new to me somehow. I think maybe I missed it because of the pandemic—it came out in 2020—and in any case, now I find myself to be reading exactly what I need to be reading right now.

The book is a mix of poems and essays charting conversations she had with white men as she taught a class on the construction and history of Whiteness at Yale. In any case, the book as well as last week’s letter have me in mind of the story I’ll tell you next.

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One of the most consequential moments in my young activist life came after an ACT UP San Francisco meeting sometime in 1990, 1991, when two white lesbian activist friends of mine and I went out for a post-meeting coffee and they told me about the way in which the white men in the organization made them feel, that anyone they didn’t want to have sex with was effectively invisible and even inaudible. “Basically, it is ‘What good are you if I can’t fuck you,’” one of them said, to describe the subtext, and as they described it to me, I began to ask myself first if I thought I did this also, and then, to ask myself if I also experienced it from these men. But I knew, as soon as they said it, it was true.

This was a life and death issue within a group dealing with life and death issues. As Sarah Schulman pointed out in her history of ACT UP, Let The Record Show, among the issues ACT UP succeeded in changing at a national and international level was getting something like parity in research and treatment for women with HIV/AIDS—even just getting their symptoms and problems acknowledged and studied. But women were in that place because they were not seen as being people to take seriously—not seen as people, period. And so among the things I would add to the list of what I learned as a young activist is how American medical research ignored women’s health for a long time.

What I would say I learned that day is that the conditioning we get in relationship to white supremacy is something we have to actively counter in ourselves. It isn’t just about acknowledging racism. When I say this meeting was consequential to me, I mean that this is when I began actively asking myself not just how I felt I was treated by white men but also how I treated them., how had I been conditioned to treat them, and how did that in turn affect the people around me? And how did that affect my role on the media committee? It is a lesson that began then and is ongoing.

The white men we were meeting in those days were most often men who had not been politically radical before. They had often lived with the privileges afforded white men in an unreflective sort of way, like most, and had never really questioned themselves about it. They were not used to having to prove what they believed because so often all they had to do was say they had a problem and people believed them and did not challenge them but instead helped them. They were not used to waiting a turn to speak, and if they interrupted you they did not expect to be interrupted in return. And for those who came with a particular sense of anger or the need to solve the very real problems related to AIDS and HIV transmission, access to treatment and healthcare, changing drug treatment protocols, safer sex education—it often exasperated them to then have to learn about their privilege as well, even as it also exasperated anyone who took on giving them the lessons. Because in order to do the work with them, we all needed to learn to be different.

This dynamic has been seen in other movements before and after this and is not unique to ACT UP. I would ask you to reflect on the dynamic described here if this is your first time seeing it described before accusing me of doing anything other than describing it. Because part of this conditioning I describe is to habitually treat even a description or a criticism of privilege as a kind of violence.

The conversation I had that day with my friends eventually led to this activity being called out in meetings, and it was often but not always dealt with. I left for New York City, where I was so sure it would be different, and was so sad when I learned it… was not exactly different. And while it was being called out there, in the years after that, I saw it affect every part of life. Anywhere I went. And I still do.

An advance copy of Sarah Schulman’s next book, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity, has just arrived to me, which also feels like some perfect timing, though I am not a “the universe gives us what we need” person, it should be said. It really doesn’t, not without us making some noise.

By way of closing, there are some wonderful activists I read now and one of them is the novelist and essayist

Sarah Thankam Mathews

, who has a remarkable newsletter out this week that helped me put my head on straight about the election. It is a kind of sequel to this other excellent newsletter of hers, about Cathedral Thinking. For those new here, I wrote about her debut novel, All This Could Be Different, for my own newsletter here a few months ago.

Also? A time sensitive action. H. R. 9495 needs to be defeated. It would give Trump’s treasury secretary sweeping powers to declare a non-profit a terrorist and deny them non-profit status. Please call or email your reps, you can do this with Five Calls right here.

Until next time,

Alexander Chee