Essay: Dear White Democrats

Read also: Feminism vs Genocide (Free to read)

And: Trump, Rape, and Racist Fuckery (Free to read)

Let’s start with what we agree on: none of us want a second Trump presidency. Neither you, the Democrat, nor me, the registered independent (of the anarchist way-to-the-left of you kind of Independent, not the Rand Paul/Ayn Rand Libertarian kind). 

I’m not a Democrat because your party only takes Arabs and Muslims seriously when we’re cops or soldiers - when we’re protecting or killing for the United States.  And even better–when we’re cops or soldiers (or their families) dumping on Trump.

Remember the time that the American Muslim father of a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq launched a scathing critique of Trump’s vow to bar Muslims from the U.S. at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in 2016? Your anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia–yes, you Democrats–sees Arabs and Muslims as a threat unless they’re cops and soldiers.

And at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this past summer Arabs and Mulsims–even cops and soldiers–were not given a spot because rather than dump on Trump, and talk about the ways they protect and kill and die for the U.S., they would’ve spoken of the ways the U.S.--under a Democratic president and vice president–is killing Palestinians (Arabs and Muslims) through its proxy Israel. Iran is not the only country in the region with proxies.

Let’s move on to numbers: 66 percent of voters in the U.S. are white. Arabs and Muslims account for about 1 percent of voters. And yet so many of you are yelling at us Arabs and Muslims, demanding we vote for your candidate, and warning us of impending autocracy if Trump wins. As if we don’t know what autocracy is.

Do you?

You are yelling at us because you recognise that if Trump wins again he will hurt you too, not just us. Autocracy is not something that is supposed to happen to you but to brown or Black people, usually somewhere far away, quite often right here but you don’t see it.

You warn us of what Trump could do to us–as if we don’t know–without even pausing for a beat to consider what the Biden-Harris administration has already done to the families of Palestinians and other Arabs and Muslims. But it happens far away doesn’t it? As if Democrats and Republicans alike in the White House haven’t invaded the countries of our kin, haven’t been bipartisan in their support of autocrats who hurt our kin.

But that happens far away and it’s not supposed to happen to you, right?

Why?

Because you’re white.

White supremacy is why.

The same arrogance and naiveté that made so many white Americans think Trump would never become president the first time around is that same arrogance and naiveté that made so many think "it would never happen here" about abortion bans, is the same arrogance and naiveté that made so many of you point to your uncles in Georgia, or grandparents in Florida to blame, the same arrogance and naiveté that convinced you fascism would never come for you too.

The privilege of whiteness meant that for many in the U.S., there was something wrong with you if you lost a right. It only happened to people who weren't white, far away somewhere. For those same white Americans, only Black and brown people in a far away country ended up with an authoritarian ruler; they deserve him somehow. 

It's easy to see the fascists and theocrats when they don't look like you.

Fascism doesn't happen overnight.

I moved to the U.S. in 2000. Over the past two decades, I have learned that many white Americans have a delusional confidence in their government and its institutions. They are childishly naive in believing that institutions will save them.

Black, Indigenous, and people of colour have no such delusions. They do not expect institutions to protect them because they are so often hurt by those institutions. They have lived in this land for hundreds of years under the constant threat of ethnic cleansing by its institutions of government and society.

And now you may well join them.

That stubborn belief in U.S. exceptionalism undergirds the refusal to see the fascism that Trump brought back then and from which you’re yelling at Arabs and Muslims to protect you. Yes, it will hurt us too and that’s why I want Trump to lose. But do you even stop for a second to see how the leaders of your party are hurting us right now?

No matter how often those of us from authoritarian countries who know to be suspicious of state power and those of us who have fought fascism–be it via military rule or the rule of religious fundamentalists–warned and warned, white Americans arrogantly shook their heads that it could not happen here.

No matter how often we warned you that the fate of nations is not a straight line bending towards a “manifest destiny,” of progressive progress, you only saw bearded dictators in military fatigues shredding constitutions and disappearing people and you refused to believe their fate awaited you.

How–with all the polls that show the majority of people in the U.S. want the U.S. to stop sending Israel weapons–do you feel represented by a candidate who has sent her husband–a Jewish American–along with the first queer Latino elected to Congress and a loud booster for Israel–to assure Jewish voters in Michigan–home of Dearborn, the city with the largest Arab population in the U.S.--that her support for Israel is unwavering?

Who did she send to assure Palestinians in the U.S., she will stop the genocide that is annihilating their families? No one. Because she won’t.

You warn us of what is to come as if what is happening right now, what has happened already, isn’t already a monumental and unconscionable crime for which this administration should be taken to The Hague.

Every day for the past year, I’ve woken up wondering how I’m going to go through my day with a genocide going on in Gaza, while living here in the country that is supplying the bombs and artillery and the money that fuel Israel’s firestorm appetite for destruction. 

Half my mind is trying to focus on the here and now, my life in New York City. The other half of my mind is wondering if Bisan is still alive and how many people lay buried under the rubble of destruction wrought by Israel.

My heart is full of volcanic rage and a sadness so deep, I don’t know where to put it, yet I cannot put it down. And my own trauma from the wars that my birth country Egypt fought with Israel is fucking with my ability to regulate my moods and sense of danger.

I took the split screen of my mind and heart to my early voting polling station in NYC and wrote Free Palestine as my write-in candidate because to choose between Harris and Trump is to stand on that split screen that so many of us who are Arab and Muslim in this time of genocide pivot between and shatter it into a breathable dust we inhale, and choke on.

I live in New York state which has been solidly blue since just about the entire country went red for Reagan in 1984. 

Instead of yelling at Palestinians in swing states whose families are under the rubble in Gaza, yell at your white fathers, uncles, and grandfathers who are the backbone of the Republican party. Trump is a rot that has blossomed after decades of white supremacy, racism, misogyny, and all forms of bigotry that the GOP proudly fertilize. 

Instead of yelling at Arabs and Muslims to save you from what you have not saved them from, yell at white women who in their majority vote Republican. How many of you started paying attention after Grab Them By the Pussygate and not after the Mexicans are rapists and drug dealers and not the vows to ban Muslims?

Fascism doesn’t happen overnight. And fascists can look like you too.

So many of you white Democrats were shocked–”This isn’t the country I know,”--when your Republican relatives swept Trump to victory in 2016. And what have you done about them?

White Christian zealots who destroyed Roe v Wade have built a white Christian theocracy while so many of you see zealots only in Afghanistan and Iran because white and Christian are the norm, the default, your parents, your aunts and uncles, your grandparents, here in the U.S.

Yes, we - the Arab and the Muslim - will suffer under fascism. But if fascism does come to America after next Tuesday, it will not be because of the 1% of voters who are Arab and Muslim, it will be because of the 66% of voters who are white – you and your relatives - and have supported Trump overwhelmingly these years.

And now you are Democrat-at-any-cost because that is what will save your white supremacy–yes, white supremacy is not the copyright of your parents, your aunts and uncles, your grandparents–and gives you the gall to yell at people whose lives are a split screen, the bifurcation of which you will never know. 

In 2011, Egyptian riot police broke my arms with batons that my tax money in the U.S. paid for. My American side funded the assault on my Egyptian side.

Today, the split screen for Palestinian Americans is of an unfathomable magnitude.

Stop yelling at Arabs and Muslims how to vote. Start yelling at your white Republican relatives.

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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.  

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