Ukraine and liberation (+ some side rants about Chicago bc why the hell not)
So, Ukraine.
You know the whole “if he wanted to, he would”? Yeah, that.
This political moment with Ukraine is significant: it is exposing both an infuriating systemic hypocrisy, as well as the potential opportunity to set a new precedent. The hardest question we just have to answer for ourselves is: what does this teach us about the potency of our demands for liberation, and the possibilities to receive the same level of solidarity?
I’ve never seen a fundraiser for/call to donate to a foreign military before, or a blatant, mainstream celebration of everyday people picking up arms. The fashion industry is one of many that has awoken from a long, deep slumber in a silk sleepwear set after donating millions to repair Notre-Dame back in April 2019 to decide that it is, suddenly again, no longer apolitical. Everyday people seem to have been struck with divine knowledge to help them apply a power analysis to global conflict, which was otherwise until this moment “too complicated” to understand and therefore take a stance on.
Institutions that are somehow always paralyzed by the slow burn of bureaucracy are moving more efficiently and quickly than the rest of us can even take in information as the situation unfolds. Boycotts, divestments, and sanctions* apparently can be administered without any concern to profit margins, logistics, or economic impacts. It reminds me again of the racist slowness and apathy in the state’s response to addressing astronomically high COVID rates in working-class Black and brown neighborhoods compared to the speed at which funds were disbursed to fund Israeli Apartheid and orchestrate airstrikes in Somalia. It reminds me of how, at the start of the pandemic, my friend Nouha Boundaoui and I worked with analysts to develop a digital dashboard to help asses PPE needs using a weighted scale based on race, class, age, and other markers that determined unequal vulnerability because City-backed distribution centers failed to implement equity analysis to mask distribution. We offered to donate everything to them. Instead, they dragged its feet, refused to use it, and after getting passed around from dept. to dept. with shorter and shorter operating hours, they instead asked us to slow down and stop working. (Ultimately Blue Tin emptied its savings (maybe not very business savvy of me but we’d do it again every time) and spent ~$50k to buy materials & mass-produce PPE that we went ahead and donated according to our model bc screw their orders to let our people die).
The Mayor and her partnering institutions willingly refused to apply an equity analysis to PPE distribution and intentionally chose mediocrity and bureaucracy in the face of Black and brown death. Racism also looks like institutions that choose when to be bureaucratically and procedurally dense, and when to be nimble.
Taken together, this means that again we’re seeing the world that we could have had, had we been white. A world without police and prisons already exists for white, upper class communities in the United States. Just drive through their neighborhoods. A Universal Basic Income already exists for military contractors, airlines, and other corporate entities the U.S. constantly bails out and works for. A world without borders exists for surveillance corporations who share data without extra security screenings or the violence of border enforcement. The language that celebrates an armed resistance to an occupying force flows openly and without fear of the FBI slipping their business card under your front door saying “we missed you, please contact us asap.” The non-violent standards that are violently imposed on Black and brown resistance domestically and around the world no longer apply to Ukraine, which means that the media and those who consume it actually do understand that non-violence is not a moral ideology but a sometimes necessary fluid tactic. So it is possible, then, to care about an issue that is happening on the other side of the world and is not directly affecting our day-to-day here in the United States. Huh. All things so many of us as anti-war organizers have always felt were simply outside the scope and capacity for average white Americans and their institutions and media and corporations. How many of you working in corporate America are now having emergency staff meetings to discuss the details of how to support Ukraine only months after you dared send a slack message asking to potentially maybe think about considering kindly possibly raising a few dollars to support Afghan refugees? So, everything we’ve asked for—and more—has always been there after all; it was just never for us.
So this then immediately means two things: first, there is now a higher standard; a new capacity that has been discovered in a very Columbus-eque way, to be held to a higher standard. Take note of the companies who are speaking out now, our peers’ newfound wisdom to see through the “complexity” of an unjust occupation, and the way in which the system moves to fight and protect.
Notably, this is almost a reverse of what many of us have spent a good amount of time yelling about on the internet: that we should not let the state expand to address white supremacist violence because it is only a momentary excuse to set a new precedent in how to harm Black and brown communities. For example, the call to expand counterterrorism funding after the January 6th, 2021 white supremacist takeover of the White House has now only expanded programs that will really only ever harm Muslim communities and Black activists.
In the case of Ukraine here, it seems the contrary: of course, we are still against state expansion, but now the state, media, and institutions are (potentially) providing a model and expectations for how to address Israeli occupation of Palestine, US airstrikes in Somalia, or Russian airstrikes in Syria.
Except there are a few key very obvious determinative facts that are not the same: we’re not white. Our resistance does not violate the empire.
So then this takes us to the second part: is it actually possible for the empire to replicate this response for us and our communities? Is our liberation enforceable by the United Nations and NATO treaties? Thinking through the possibility of these questions is a tangible expression of what Black organizers mean when they say “this system was not made for us.” It is directly contradictory for the status quo, the world order as-is, to express the same level of solidarity for Palestine, Yemen, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc as they do Ukraine. Yemeni and Palestinian resistance threaten US and Western geographic power within the Middle East and around critical supply chain routes of capitalism vis-à-vis the Suez canal, and as a powerful land connector between Africa and the Middle East, respectively. We will never get a Ukrainian-level response to our resistance and occupation because our resistance threatens the empire and its lifeblood: our bodies and labor, resources, minds, and land.
It always feels like the more we learn and the world around us unfolds, the more the only way we can keep ourselves safe and move us closer to liberation is building our own power independent of the systems that neither want to, nor can, care for us. Until then, use their own words against them. It’s the baseline “logic” this country’s entire legal system is rooted in: precedent. If the fashion industry is putting together an open letter that is titled “Fashion Unites Against War,” let them do it. Ask them to add Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and Palestine — they’re against war, after all. Ask them how they plan on addressing the wars they benefit from by creating markets for cheap labor.
In your next emergency staff meeting ask them how they are defining “occupation” and “crisis.” Write it down. Have them create a rubric for how they are responding to these things. Then use it. When they’re done, dare them to explain the difference between Ukraine and Palestine without using the word “civilized.”
Never again let anyone tell you the foreign occupation and bombing of land is “too complicated” or “too political” to support. Never again let a company tell you that boycotts and divestments are too economically or logistically complicated to uphold.
If the “civilized” world is finally ready to evolve and join the rest of us and come out against war, let them do it.
And hold them to it.
At least in this present moment that’s what has been on my mind: how to balance both a naïve optimism that a new rubric has been created that we can use to push accountability, with also a deeper recognition that their institutions and states and treaties are unable and existentially incapable of extending the same humanity to our communities, because our liberation would crumble their empire.
In the meantime, sending all my love to all of our people occupied, sanctioned to death, air-striked, droned, surveilled, bombed, and invaded, and told that your lives and your families’ and communities’ lives could wait. <3
Also solidarity with the (non-racist) people of Ukraine (who are not moving to illegal settlements in Israel), of course <3
* targeted, military sanctions here not to be confused with the extremely violent sanctions that are literally starving and killing people living Iran, Gaza, and elsewhere. More on that here: