Disposable People, Disposable Planet

By Kitanya Harrison

Disposable People, Disposable Planet is a collection of essays about fear and hope. The world is undergoing a sea change, and that change is being live-tweeted. In her collection of essays, Kitanya Harrison shares her journey to navigate the uncertainty and dread the upheaval is causing as well as her search for moments of hope and optimism. The title of the collection takes its name from an essay on the climate crisis, which explores the connection between people who are thrown away by societies that devalue them and the disposing of the whole planet. Each essay in the collection wrestles in some way with the question of who is valued. Who is saved? Who is tossed on the trash heap?

 

Pop culture and current events are the lenses through which Harrison makes her incisive observations. Whether she's talking about Jay-Z and the failures of capitalism, the wrenching fallout from Nipsey Hussle's murder, mass surveillance and Sherlock Holmes, civility as a form of social violence, Kawhi Leonard's disciplined silence, or the grotesqueries of "hustle" and "rise and grind" culture, Harrison's writing is sharp, confrontational, and challenging.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Uprise Independent Press
• Release date: Dec 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9789769593046

Book preview

For my readers – the bulwark between my words and the void.

Introduction

I’m writing this as 2018 – an emotional rollercoaster of a year that seemed like it would never end – comes to a close. Like many writers, I was moved to take stock of my writing over the past year. There are a handful of pieces I’m incredibly proud of that didn’t make it into this volume. There is other work I wished I’d taken a few more passes at. I stand behind everything I wrote and believe my more challenging pieces made me a better writer.

As I perused my work, I began to see that I’d unwittingly been exploring a theme: disposability. My writing on climate change late in the year is what shook the realization loose – the planet itself, from which none of us can escape, is being treated as disposable.

Much of my writing is about race, culture, and politics. At the heart of it is the fight to see that human beings aren’t treated as disposable. Some of us are, though. Some of us have always been. I’m coming to see more clearly how straight a line there is between dehumanization and environmental malfeasance. It is the disposable people who will have to contend with the harshest consequences of a planet that has been stripped to the struts.

I took a deeper dive into my prior year’s work to pull out and fine-tune pieces I believed spoke in a meaningful way to the theme of disposability. Each essay in this volume discusses something precious that is being devalued. Black lives. The rainforest. Facts. Silence and solitude.

I’m eternally grateful to my readers, who found value in my work. Through correspondence with them on Medium, Twitter, Instagram and Patreon, I’ve been able to sharpen my pen. I’m also grateful to Medium for featuring some of the pieces included in this volume and helping me find a wider audience. With this support, I find myself at the beginning of a new adventure, one I embark on with some trepidation but mostly with anticipation and hopefulness.

I. CULTURE

At its root, culture is about values and how we express them. It is the clearest indicator of what is important to us. It is how we process the world and explain it to ourselves. Entertainment is much bigger than diversion to pass the time. I don’t believe there is such a thing as passive consumption of ideas, particularly those that are repeated enough to become tropes. Culture tells us whom and what to value, whom and what to deride, whom and what to discard. Who is guiding the valuing, deriding, and discarding isn’t always as clear as it seems, though.

Much of my work on culture intersects with critiques of capitalism. Like many, I’m struggling with the knowledge that it has failed and must be dismantled if we’re to stop the destruction of the climate and the environment. It’s become a matter of the survival of the species.

The Difficulty in Defining Donald Glover’s ‘This is America’

I woke up one Sunday morning to see #ThisIsAmerica trending and clicked through to find Childish Gambino’s new music video on YouTube. The first viewing reinforced my thoughts on Donald Glover (aka Childish Gambino): He’s carving out a unique place for himself in American popular culture — a place that’s difficult to define because it’s somewhere between commercial success and subversion. This is America is an indictment of a gun-crazed, violent society. It’s also a commentary on Black American entertainers’ role in perpetuating, glamorizing, and covering for the sins of their nation.

This is America is a musical — the song and the visuals can’t really be separated. Director Hiro Murai understands the language of cinema, and this short film is carefully crafted.

The action doesn’t really start until Glover takes a highly stylized pose that evokes (how deliberately, I don’t know) the posture seen in old Jim Crow posters and shoots a handcuffed, hooded prisoner in the back of the head. A boy takes the gun from him to dispose of it, and two others begin to drag away the body. Glover, the star of this show, represents himself as a murderer, as complicit — he is America. And, I suppose that’s his choice to make, but, most notably, This is America contains no White perpetrators. Even when the Charleston massacre is crudely re-enacted, it is Glover who pulls the trigger. Why? Why name it This is America without some clear representation of White supremacist violence? There are hints of police brutality sprinkled throughout the video, but never in the foreground. Why were these choices made?

Donald Glover has navigated Hollywood too well not to understand the White gaze. He knows how to make White America feel comfortable. And he knows just how far to push when poking at its failings. He also knows how to make Black people uncomfortable instead by highlighting Black trauma and the pathologies that plague Black communities.

But I don’t know that having a Black man pull the trigger in the video is that simple.

This is America. Don’t catch me slipping, now, Glover raps.

Don’t catch me slipping. There’s always a way to make Black people’s suffering seem like our own fault, no matter how targeted or deliberate the attacks against us are. If you get got, it’s because you and your people got caught slipping. There’s a reason headlines make it seem like cops’ bullets fire themselves. Even their guns get the benefit of the doubt; Black people shot full of holes don’t.

The narrative that Black America is solely responsible for all the violence it suffers is centuries-old and extremely resilient. This is where Kanye West’s statements about slavery being a choice find their roots. It’s more palatable to blame the victims then coerce them into forgiving the perpetrators of the violence against them. This upside-down world is what Black Americans have to negotiate without losing their minds. As he dances through the frame, Glover goes from grimacing to grinning in split seconds, from brutal violence to almost shucking and jiving. He skillfully navigates the madness and chaos unfolding behind him. At the end, he’s sweaty, wide-eyed, and running for his life.

This is America, where Blackness is pathologized and capitalism warps ghastly incentives even further. Black people in America have been selected to be the lowest rung, the exploited class upon which the nation’s wealth is built. It’s no accident that Black entertainment has become one of the primary vehicles for masking this reality. There’s a reason the gaudy exhibitions of new Black money are reliably programmed.

When the choir raises their voices to sing, Grandma told me, ‘Get your money, Black man!’ I can’t tell if it’s a cry for reparations or a call to dive headfirst into the rapacious, winner-take-all capitalism of America’s streets and boardrooms. And while I’m not convinced that this uncertainty isn’t deliberate (a slippery way of not alienating anyone), that tension is at the heart of the truth Glover is telling. Survival demands that Black people participate in an immoral, capitalist system that brutalizes them, and justice demands the wealth built on the backs of our stolen ancestors be returned to us. We try to achieve both and end up accomplishing neither.

As Glover and his crew of teenage backup dancers nail the latest dance crazes, we watch them and not the surrounding bedlam — and that’s the point. We’ve been anaesthetized. This is America isn’t a wake-up call, because nothing is. Not the killer cops, not the mass shootings of children by other children, not the incipient fascism in the White House. Nothing. It’s just ever-devolving turmoil with seemingly no end in sight, and all we can do is watch the people singing, rapping and dancing in the foreground.

This is America.

Kanye, the Kardashians, and the Madness-Making of Chasing Whiteness

Kanye West desperately wants to transcend his Blackness, and his inability to do so may be driving him mad.

There’s a certain kind of Black person who is obsessed with Whiteness and spends every moment of their life trying to achieve proximity to it. I’ve long suspected that Kanye West is such a person, and recent events seem to have proven this out. A man whose father was a Black Panther and whose mother was an educator and an activist reduced 400 years of the oppression of his people to a choice — not of the slave masters but of the enslaved. And he made this utterly bizarre, ahistorical, victim-blaming declaration during a tabloid interview, in which he confessed to having liposuction to please his fan base.

A man who can’t stand up to the social pressure to be thin believes his ancestors who endured the brutality of chattel slavery should have fought harder to attain their freedom. Does such a person possess the moral authority to make these kinds of dismissive arguments about even mental slavery?

Kanye’s lack of self-awareness is staggering, as is his obliviousness and ignorance of history. It was a bit frightening watching a Black man speak so carelessly and scrape the suffering of his people off the bottom of his shoe. Particularly when we all know who would be watching, eating up his words and weaponizing them to further agendas that would harm the people he used to be, the people he is now separated from because of his wealth and fame.

Whatever you think of Kanye West, that he is a rare talent is undeniable. He’s one of the best ever to practice his chosen art form. He is exceptional. But he wants more, and access to the sort of wealth and status he seeks has never been given to a Black entertainer. He’s spoken of banging into that glass ceiling while trying to break his way into fashion and design. His design aesthetic is at odds with what you’d expect from the mind that gave us work ranging from College Dropout to 808s and Heartbreak to My Beautiful, Dark, Twisted Fantasy to Yeezus. The creative, manic, self-hating dreamer we can hear in his music is missing in his fashion design. The result: Kanye West is a mediocre fashion designer, and the world of high fashion (like most elite White spaces) is closed to Black mediocrity.

I personally think the clothes Kanye designs are the sort of depressing sartorial choices a post-Apocalyptic cult might make, but the fashion industry routinely elevates preposterous trends. If the powers-that-be chose, his we live in an underground grain silo to protect us from the radiation aesthetic could take off. But he hasn’t been chosen, and it enrages him. He’s allowed to participate and use his celebrity to draw attention, but he has yet to be lauded, which is what he truly seeks: to be called a genius. His partnership with Adidas has been fruitful, but he clearly wants to make a name for himself in the world over which Anna Wintour and Emmanuelle Alt preside, one in which sneaker culture is far too urban to be more than a side note.

A few years ago when Kanye went on Twitter and confessed to being $53 million in debt, I believed him. I think that’s how far in the hole his foray into designing put him. Do you know who was printing money in the meantime? His wife, Kim Kardashian, and her family.

To say the Kardashians are mediocre at everything outside of self-promotion would be kind. There isn’t a notable talent among them. They have routinely been accused of stealing the intellectual property of up-and-coming creatives (particularly Black women) and appropriating Black culture. I would describe them as vampiric. Kanye West chose to marry into that coven.

The Kardashians have built quite the empire and have mastered the give me attention! game better than anyone who has ever played it. Kanye’s self-absorption is legendary, so it was predictable that he would be attracted to the machinery they’ve built around themselves. The Kardashians also brought him closer to the Whiteness he covets and the free passes it gives out. But Kanye has confessed that he doesn’t read, and he lives inside his own head, so he still has yet to realize that Whiteness and its benefits aren’t transferable.

Kanye tweeting out the photos of his home — a barren, white space that looks like an abandoned, haunted monastery — and unironically asking, do this look like the sunken place captured his condition in an image. He lives surrounded by Whiteness that is undecorated, unseasoned, oppressive, and empty. The back-and-forth with his mother-in-law about the value of the property was the sprinkling of raisins in the bland potato salad.

(I wonder: What is it like to construct your entire existence around stunting on the plebeians?)

As Kanye struggled with his designing, the Kardashian empire didn’t lose a step, and it only seems to be gaining momentum. His in-laws’ mediocrity hasn’t been an impediment to their success, just as Donald Trump’s wasn’t. That is what he sees in these people: they transcend the expectations any reasonable assessment of their talents would predict. And he can’t understand why the same outcome escapes him. He is blind to the on-ramp and clear path Whiteness provides to reach certain spaces (particularly when it’s coupled with strident shamelessness). Black people can’t get away with what the Kardashians and Donald Trump do, and Kanye West despite all his fame, notoriety, and wealth is still Black.

Kanye West believes the myth of the American Dream, because he’s one of the handful of people to have achieved it. He won because he was leaps and bounds better than everyone else, and he thinks those same rules apply across the board. The cognitive dissonance brought on by watching White mediocrity be lavished with outsized rewards day in and day out is damaging him psychologically each moment he endures it. He lives behind the curtain now but can’t see the truth. He can’t accept how the sausage is made. To believe what he sees is to betray the principles that got him to where he is. He senses he needs a change, though, and the only other way of life he’s chosen to expose himself to is the Kardashians’.

What we’re watching is Kanye West trying to out-Kardashian the Kardashians. He’s seen their formula work up close, and he’s taken it and is running off a cliff with it. He doesn’t appreciate the danger or the consequences of attaching himself to Donald Trump. All he sees are the retweets and his name trending. His new interest in real estate development along with his aspirations to run for President signal that he intends to try and out-Trump Trump next. He doesn’t understand that his Blackness means he doesn’t have the same leeway for mistakes that Donald Trump does and that he won’t be able to hide behind White innocence the way the women in his family can when it all comes crashing down and the check comes due. He’s screaming Pay attention to me! and we