THE SOLIDARITY MYTH - Cheryl Mercado Arnedt

THE SOLIDARITY MYTH (eBook)

Reflections on Liberalism and Anti-racism in the Wake of Palestine

Cheryl Mercado Arnedt (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
192 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-8675-4 (ISBN)

A hot-off-the-presses account of the events in Palestine, the United States, Israel, and Lebanon since October 7, 2023. Veteran public-opinion pollster and election analyst Cheryl Mercado Arnedt focuses her keen analytic skills on the people and forces that brought us to a point in time when the vast majority of Americans remained stubbornly unmoved by a 24/7 livestreamed genocide. Released just days before Election Day 2024, The Solidarity Myth provides readers with plenty of food for thought on the other side of the 2024 presidential campaign season to help people navigate what Arnedt calls 'this ever-darkening American midnight.'

Cheryl is a 35-year veteran public-opinion pollster, exit pollster, and election analyst, most notably as Deputy Director of Polling at both CBS News and ABC News. She trains her keen analytic eye on pressing issues like racism, white supremacy, colonialism, and the military-industrial complex on her Instagram platform @whyisthatracist. As a 61-year-old Newark, New Jersey native of Irish, Filipino, Japanese, and German descent, she relies heavily on the wisdom and work of her Irish revolutionary ancestors who strived to fight off the colonial oppression of the British Empire. She is currently at work on her second book to be self-published before Inauguration Day, January 20, 2025, titled BRAT NATION: Lessons From Election 2024. The mother of two grown sons, Sam and Charlie, Arnedt has worn many hats including as a small-business owner, an amateur stand-up comic, and a public-art and public-education advocate. She lives in Pike County, Pennsylvania, with her husband of 33 years, Tyson.

A hot-off-the-presses account of the events in Palestine, the United States, Israel, and Lebanon since October 7, 2023. Veteran public-opinion pollster and election analyst Cheryl Mercado Arnedt focuses her keen analytic skills on the people and forces that brought us to a point in time when the vast majority of Americans remained stubbornly unmoved by a 24/7 livestreamed genocide. Part One is a heartfelt explication of what transpired as Americans and those around the world bore witness to the unfolding atrocities in Gaza. Part Two lays out tough issues that need to be faced squarely including tackling Islamophobic and racist hatred, understanding the nature of terrorism, and dispelling the widespread propaganda meant to obscure what has happened in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. The last part titled "e;Where Do We Go From Here?"e; is a humane call to action, illuminating the work of legendary activists from whom we can all learn as we build a better future together. Released just days before Election Day 2024, The Solidarity Myth provides readers with plenty of food for thought on the other side of the 2024 presidential campaign season to help people navigate what Arnedt calls "e;this ever-darkening American midnight."e;

OCTOBER 6 AT THE APOLLO

Before the Awakening

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction,
and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after
that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

—James Baldwin

Oh, what a difference a genocide makes.

October 6, 2023, was the first day of a three-day gathering at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York. The Festival of Arts & Ideas, [at] The Intersection, was the brainchild of acclaimed author and Apollo artist-in-residence Ta-Nehisi Coates. For the inaugural festival, Coates curated an astounding array of Black luminaries from the diaspora across multiple disciplines: Nikole Hannah-Jones, Bassey Ikpi, Bisa Butler, Barry Jenkins, Liesl Tommy, Luvvie Ajayi Jones, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, Ami Taf Ra, and Michael Harriot, to name a few. I was immensely grateful to be in the presence of such greatness and was eager to listen in on what proved to be a rich exchange of ideas from people I’d long studied and admired.

I don’t recall exactly how I learned about the attacks in Gaza on October 7, the second day of the festival, but I do remember, as people filed into the main theater on that rainy Saturday morning, that I was worried about some family members who had flown to Tel Aviv a few days earlier and made a note to text my son Charlie at intermission. During the break in the panels, I was standing by myself in the lobby when a tall white woman who looked to be in her 40s introduced herself as one of my Instagram followers. It was the first time someone recognized me in public from my @whyisthatracist account, and I was happy to meet, in person, another white woman who was aligned with my anti-racist values. She was kind and animated and talkative and excited, like I was, to be listening to so many great Black minds, many of whom were our idols we held dear.

Lorelei O’Hagan was further along in her anti-racism education than I, and her ideas about abolition were especially intriguing. I’d never heard a person in real life talk about the outright abolition of prisons, modern-day policing, and the other systems that comprise the American criminal injustice scheme. While my voice has grown bolder since that day, at that point I deliberately avoided topics and phrases like “defund the police,” “reparations,” and “abolition,” knowing these terms tend to stop conversations with white Americans before they even start. I’d consciously decided to keep these and other issues on the back burner as I focused on broader themes like white supremacy and white saviorism with a mix of graphics, reels, Instagram live broadcasts, and multislide carousels. I threw everything in my anti-racism arsenal at my growing IG community to instigate what I call “aha moments” so that others might begin the process of self-examination required to unlearn our white-supremacist indoctrination in earnest.

Lorelei and I decided to sit with each other to listen to the late-morning panel discussions and then grab lunch down the block on 125th Street. We were interrupted by several texts from my son Charlie with whom I was staying a few blocks northwest of our old apartment. Charlie is 26 and the youngest of my two sons, and as one of our family’s “connectors” he’d already been keeping tabs on our relatives in Tel Aviv: Were they okay, were they going to leave, how would they get out, and when? I shared some of these family details with Lorelei, and we talked briefly about what exactly the attack might mean for us in our respective abolition and anti-racism work. This was only hours into our new global reality, and the only thing we knew for certain is that we didn’t know what lay ahead.

Looking back on that day is painful on so many levels. The copious notes, catalytic revelations, nascent ideas, and enormous hopes for the future that I garnered from the festival have since become confused, some stripped away entirely, as the people of Palestine have brought broader issues of our shared humanity and inhumanity into focus. The July 21, 2024, announcement by President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. that he was withdrawing from the race and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris to be the Democratic Party’s nominee literally cleaved the anti-racism community in two. Almost overnight many anti-racism advocates who I long followed and admired began talking in sound bites and talking points touting joy and hope and freedom awash in a vitriolic backlash against Palestinian Americans in general and anti-genocide protestors in particular.

As the propaganda became more tyrannical, a massive front of Blue MAGAs emerged. In the style of the much-maligned Red MAGAs— the acronym for Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan—Blue MAGA acolytes rapidly lined up like tin soldiers behind their anointed candidate. Harris’s ascension, without one vote cast by a sitting president who withdrew from the race via tweet, set the KHive (the term used to describe her ardent supporters) in motion. As the KHive eviscerated people like me who dared to speak up and out against our government’s ongoing funding of Israel’s ethnic-cleansing spree in Gaza, the anti-racism arsenal I’d carefully built was decimated. The onslaught of transactional politicking, performative activism, white saviorism, and identity politics was demoralizing and depressing.

I’ve revisited my notes from the Apollo festival many times while writing this book—pages of broad, slanted, nonlinear scrawls written in a black spiral pad they’d handed out to attendees. I can’t quite remember when exactly it “clicked” that what I was seeing was in fact a genocide, but this notebook is a physical demarcation of my pre- and post-genocide life. It’s a tangible object of this gruesome path so many of us have traveled since that day, bearing witness to a live-streamed genocide for 12 straight months while our friends, neighbors, partners, siblings, parents, children, in-laws, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, co-workers, and others explain away their indifference, if they bother to explain at all.

Because it holds such significance for me, I write in that notepad sparingly, saving it for more important conversations. The last entry is from August 9, 2024, after I’d had a long discussion with my friend Leila Hazou, a Palestinian American who owns a small business in the Pennsylvania town where I’ve lived with my husband Tyson for the past three years. As the genocide dragged on through the fall, Leila decided to oppose incumbent Democratic Senator Bob Casey in the perennial swing state and is currently on the ballot running for U.S. Senate on the Green Party ticket. In my career, most notably as Deputy Director of Polling at CBS News, I’ve analyzed elections and voter behavior for more than three decades and can rattle off swing-state margins from years past that are lodged in my data-laden brain. I’d cursorily followed the non–major party candidates and decided to dial in more closely after meeting Leila. When Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein named Dr. Butch Ware as her vice-presidential running mate, I tuned in more closely to evaluate the impact non–major party candidates might have on the 2024 election.

That day, Leila and I were still fuming about Harris’s now infamous “I’m speaking” speech where she had verbally punched down on women wearing hijabs who were protesting at a campaign event in Detroit. The Greater Detroit area is home to the largest concentration of Arabic-speaking and Muslim people in the country, many of whom have lost dozens of family members in the current Gaza genocide. Harris’s complete lack of respect for the anti-genocide protestors in Muslim-heavy Detroit was despicable. The candidate side-eyed the hijabis, saying “You know what, if you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.”

A sea of Black, brown, and LGBTQIA+ Harris supporters clapped and cheered with laughter, drowning out the protestors. The “I’m speaking” quip quickly became a meme and was plastered on T-shirts, framing her smackdown as the bad-ass move of a powerful Black woman instead of the callous dismissal it was. As Leila and I discussed Harris’s proud derisiveness of Democratic voters who had lost so many at the hands of her Democratic administration, I wrote snippets like “Never side with the oppressor” and “Always side with the oppressed” in my notebook as we tried to make sense of what this very public rebuke meant for the future of the pro-Palestinian movement.

The truths about America’s essence—our country and how it came to be—are common knowledge among the billions of people who comprise the Global South. The genocide in Palestine—the shocking videos and photos, personal stories, and Palestinian journalists’ accounts of the violence and destruction by Israeli forces in Gaza—has awakened many Americans to the true nature of our country, to the crimes the founders committed and their consequences.

It is essential at this moment in history that we face these truths, ones the descendants of the...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	11.12.2024
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
ISBN-13	979-8-3509-8675-4 / 9798350986754

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