Get Up, Stand Up

Abstract

Get Up, Stand Up Jacob Paul author's note (july 28, 2019) I have begun this introduction five times, and I have torn it up (figuratively speaking) five times. Yes, I am borrowing this line from James Baldwin's letter to his nephew on the hundredth anniversary of emancipation: I do so for several reasons. First, this is literally my fifth go at this. Second, there's something about this particular task: first, of reminding an audience of what the tail end of 2016, post–Trump's election victory, prior to his inauguration, felt like, and of what the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline DAPL) at Standing Rock against that backdrop felt like; and second, in epilogue, of reflecting upon that moment… There's something about this task that leads the sensibility of what I want to say, its felt truth, to reject the paltry language of what I've actually written. Third, after these five attempts, and the thinking and talking through that accompanied them, I've come to realize that the crime for which Baldwin goes on to condemn his countrymen is the thing that I am trying to write about. That crime, Baldwin writes, is not just that his country and his countrymen have destroyed, and are destroying, hundreds of thousands of lives, it is that they do not know and do not want to know that they are. Because, Baldwin writes, "It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is this innocence which constitutes the crime." I realize now that the vertiginous fear and energy of that moment, the sense that one was walking out onto a bridge whose span ended somewhere, high and midair, deep in a fog, the urgency to act, the urgency to serve, was predicated on a bracing loss of innocence, a compulsion to not just know intellectually, but viscerally by placing one's body at the business end of the state's visible violence. In other words, those of us who indemnified our privilege by relying upon a Hegelian notion of history bending toward King's concept of justice, as if that, too, wasn't the narcissistic mythology of manifest destiny, were suddenly forced to confront not only the inadequacies of our armchair strategies for just social change, but the real possibility that violent oppression [End Page 805] would soon, and rapidly, refuse to be sequestered to the recesses of our societal topography and come hammer on our front doors. Indeed, my then eighty-eight-year-old Republican father convinced me to make a plan by which to flee the country should they actually come for the Muslims, because, as he said, they'll always also come for the Jews, which isn't something with which I necessarily disagree. So, my caste, which is leftist, and often activist, but also technocratic, comfortably middle-class, educated, mostly white, largely, gainfully employed, and invariably self-satisfied, had to confront not just the emptiness of our social justice credentials, but the real possibility that the state's violence would now be directed at us as well. And then, against that backdrop, there were shocking and romantic images of young Lakota on spotted ponies standing off against armored personnel carriers on the Dakota plains… paramilitarized police firing round after round of tear gas at nonviolent water protectors in prayer circles … this while Obama was still in office, when we hadn't yet gotten anywhere near the precipice at the end of the bridge's unfinished span. ________ If I had to be as simple as possible, I would say these two things: 1. The simplest reason to support the Lakhóta People, the Sioux, in their struggle at Standing Rock was, is, because they asked for support. It's the reason to keep actively supporting them now, even after Sunday's decision by the army to not grant Energy Transfer Partners an easement to run the Dakota Access pipeline beneath the Missouri River at Lake Oahe. The Sioux are a sovereign people, a people who've suffered hundreds of years of injustice, genocide, and oppression by Americans. That oppression has always been carried out by the army...