"It has them acting in ways that violate their morals"

Beyond the Book: The worldwide political weaponization of trauma

Photo by Joey Yu on Unsplash

Something weird has been happening on social media.

Yes, I know that something weird is always happening on social media. But this is different.

I, and many others, have been speaking out consistently against the genocide in Palestine for almost a year now. Jeezus, a year. What a gut punch, eh? Anyways, we’ve been speaking out, marching, disrupting - doing whatever we can to raise awareness and to make the willful ignorance of genocide impossible and the support of genocide untenable.

And in some ways we’ve been making progress. Yes, this genocide is still happening at full speed, but we had been seeing rising numbers of people understanding that this has to stop. We’ve been seeing greater understanding of how the U.S. government has been a key supporter of this genocide, and how it ties to the racism and colonialism that so many of us suffer under. We were seeing the political strain that our leaders had increase, as they tried to appease the powers that give them money, with the people making it clear that they weren’t going to vote for them again if they didn’t call for a ceasefire.

Then we started to hear increasing whispers about “Project 2025,” the great conservative plan to take away all of our rights. All this project needs, apparently, is the election of Trump to put it all into place. The fear around this started to dampen some people’s cries to hold Biden accountable for his enthusiastic support of genocide. It seemed to happen with the most privileged people first. Those for whom a fascist government that targets you is an unthinkable horror - instead of a reality that’s already here for many of us.

Then, partially due to the continued work of anti-genocide protestors and activists, Biden was pressured to not seek reelection, and Kamala Harris was the presumptive nominee.

And that’s when things started to get weird.

I had been shadow-banned on social media pretty consistently since October. But suddenly, I wasn’t feeling that shadowban anymore. Every post I made calling out the Biden-Harris administration, or trying to call on Harris for a change in policy around arming the Israeli government’s brutal assault on Palestine was seen by a lot of people.

Well, it was seen by some people, and a whole lot of “people.” My posts were suddenly flooded with comments from people - a lot of Black people - that I’d never interacted with before. They were almost all asserting three things:

1. They were going to proudly vote for Harris

2. If we didn’t vote for Harris, we would all be signing our own death warrants.

3. It’s sad what’s happening to the Palestinians, but they weren’t going to sacrifice themselves or the Black community for a genocide on the other side of the world.

Let it be noted that I’ve not in any of these posts told people how to vote or to not vote. But comments immediately started asserting why we had to vote a particular way. It was clear that a lot of these comments were from bots or paid posters. I’ve been around long enough to know what fake Black people look like on the internet. But I was also seeing comments from Black people that I do know are real Black people expressing similar sentiments. Suddenly things went from “nobody is free until we’re all free” to, as my mom says when somebody tries to cut in front of her in traffic, “you’re first after me.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. Project 2025 is fucking terrifying. So is every other plan that fascists have come up with to try to squeeze a few more years out of white male supremacy in end-stage capitalism. I’m not saying that it’s something to take lightly. But people have been acting like we’re dealing with Marvel supervillains who have been laying out some master plan of world domination that they will suddenly spring upon us, instead of, say, very openly normalizing and increasing fascism in our government across party lines for years now.

Every four years we find ourselves in this warped political hostage situation, as our “left” becomes more and more “center-right” and even passes that to full blown “we love cops and hate immigration” (seriously y’all, have you been paying attention to the actual words that Harris has been saying during this campaign, or are we still all about the vibes?) we’ve been beat over the head with the demand that we vote “blue no matter who” in order to avoid an even faster descent into fascism. We can’t push for change right now. That’s how we lose an election. These candidates will get to it all once they are elected, we’re told. But they never do.

But this election, I was suddenly seeing a deep terror in many in our community that I hadn’t seen before. People were conjuring up images of separate drinking fountains and public lynchings as what was in store if we didn’t give Harris our immediate, unconditional support. And in the face of that fear of what could be - of what we keep being promised over and over will be if we don’t fall in line - there’s no room to care about the absolute horrors actually being visited upon Palestinians right now with our tax dollars. There’s no room to genuinely care about our Palestinian-American friends and neighbors who are losing entire families to U.S. made bombs.

Shortly after October 7, I noticed a shift in some of my Jewish friends that was shocking. Friends who had been openly critical of Israel, even some who had considered themselves anti-Zionist, were suddenly making excuses for genocide. It’s not really a genocide if there are still some Palestinians alive, some argued. We have no choice. It’s us or them, some said. Suddenly people I’d known for years to talk about solidarity and global liberation were terrified of Palestinian liberation and literally telling me that “free Palestine” meant death to them. I was stunned at seeing people I’d known for years move so quickly and so far away from the morals I’d once thought they held deeply.

Many of my Jewish friends, of course, did not go down that path. Many of them have been at the front of protests and anti-genocide actions for months now. But they’ve also expressed to me their own shock at how many people they loved and respected are no longer in their lives because of their extreme reactions to their anti-genocide work. Some have lost lifelong friendships, jobs, community connection, and even been cut off from family, for trying to get these bombs to stop falling.

A few weeks ago I was sitting at a bar in Paris with a friend of mine and we had a conversation that compelled me to write this post. My only Paris friends are other journalists, so the moment our little group sat down to see each other after a year apart, we started asking each other about politics. I asked about the recent French elections and current government crisis that seems to be brewing there, and they asked me what I think about Kamala Harris. I talked about my shock at seeing people in my community, who had been speaking out for Palestine for months, literally delete their pro-Palestine posts after Harris was announced as the candidate. They had noticed the shift in U.S. discourse too, even from France, and they were mystified by it.

After most people had gone home, and it was just my partner and I and one Paris friend, I took the opportunity to ask our friend about what he was seeing in his community as a pro-Palestinian Iranian. I had seen online a deep anti-Palestinian sentiment from some in the Iranian diaspora, especially in the U.S.. I asked him how his parents were doing with everything that had been happening in the region.

“Not well at all,” he told me, “they’re deeply traumatized right now.”

He went on to express his dismay at their reactions to current events. His parents, who had always been on the side of liberation and against violence, were so deeply fearful of Hamas and it’s ties to the horrifically repressive Iranian regime, that they were suddenly in support of Israel’s murderous actions. As tensions between Israel and Iran have increased, they had even expressed a hope that maybe a war would break out between the two countries and the Iranian regime would be defeated. They were suddenly fearful of the Iranian regime, even from their homes in France, in a way that he hadn’t seen before. And the thought of Palestinian liberation would equal a victory for Hamas, which would be a victory for Iran, which felt to them like a threat to their own lives.

It didn’t make sense to my friend. Their trauma had them acting in ways that violated their morals, he said with a shake of his head.

As we had this conversation I realized how much trauma we had all been steeped in. Not just the trauma and horror of what is happening right now. But the widespread activation of intergenerational trauma. Some of this was to be expected. I cannot, as a Black person, see so much violence around the world targeting Black and brown peoples, and not feel the triggering of the deep horror of violence that my blood and bones know so well.

But what we’re experiencing right now goes beyond this. It is no coincidence that so many populations who have deep experience with violence, oppression and even genocide are feeling deeply threatened at our cores as our intergenerational trauma is triggered.

It is no coincidence that Black people, Jewish people, and Iranian people are all being made to feel right now, at the same time, just as support for Palestinian liberation has been rising, that the fight to end genocide in Gaza is actually a threat to our own lives.

When our deeply-held trauma is triggered, we really think we are fighting for our lives, even if we are not. And in that mode, when we’re half in reality and half in a violent past that we’ve always known could come back at any time, we are not our rational selves. We are not our intersectional selves. We are not leaning into our political analysis. We are not strategic.

We are under threat. It is us or them.

And y’all, this is not how we get free.

As terrifying as it is, we have to take a deep breath. We have to look at our trauma, how it’s being triggered, who is actually triggering it, and why. Who benefits from us thinking that our survival requires our complicity in genocide? Who benefits from us thinking every four years that our lives are at risk if we don’t fall in line? Who benefits from telling us that the stakes are always too high for us to risk pushing for real change? Who benefits from us staying afraid of each other, from us seeing other’s liberation as a threat to our own? Who benefits from us staying so deeply hurt and unhealed?

We have to figure out a way to let our higher selves lead even when we are being told that it’s too risky to do so. We have to figure out a way to move towards each other in crisis even when we’re lied to and told that our neighbor is a threat to us. We have to learn how to strategize not only for survival, but for liberation. And we have to figure it out quickly.

Because while we’re being told right now that so many things will kill us, there’s a fundamental truth that isn’t being mentioned nearly enough: if we can be made to stop seeing the humanity in each other, there is absolutely no way we can survive.