On Anger I
“And the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq—I mean, of Ukraine.”
Former President George W. Bush chuckles. “Iraq too.” The audience laughs.
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Only when red hazes my vision am I clear-eyed.
At least my anger did not fund an $8,000,000,000,000 war. It did not kill 387,000 innocent civilians nor did it displace 38,000,000 people.
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All this unfettered violence in the world and my militancy blooms.
On Climate Bullshit
Gerry Anderson, the former CEO of DTE Energy, the third dirtiest energy utility in the country at the time was invited to speak at the Ross School of Business about climate change. Even though almost 60% of DTE’s fuel mix is derived from burning coal, he was spotlighted as a climate hero while in my ancestral home of Pakistan, people were succumbing to the horrors of climate-induced flooding.
Alongside several climate justice protestors, we strode onto the stage minutes into his speech and occupied the space behind him, our signs reading “PEOPLE OVER PROFIT” and “STOP WORKING FOR CLIMATE KILLING CORPORATIONS.” He was caught by surprise, but he laughed it off and allowed us to remain on stage. We stood there for the full duration of his talk in which he traced his early distaste toward the corporate world to his now lucrative career within it.
I felt ambivalent about whether our message penetrated the moral consciousness of the future greenwashers in the audience, considering the way they fell for Mr. Anderson’s charisma. He’s confident, self-assured, and even handsome. He has the power to convince us he’s an environmentalist and that his profit-sucking corporation actually gives a fuck about the environment. It doesn’t matter that Pakistani children are being killed by disease-carrying water from a climate emergency that Western corporations created. It doesn’t matter that their homes have been irrevocably destroyed. It doesn’t matter that they are still deprived of safe drinking water many months later. There is wealth to be extracted and shareholders to satisfy.
Before the event transitioned into a Q&A session, one of the student organizers asked to ask us to leave the stage. In a saccharine voice that betrayed any sort of authenticity, she declared, “We’re all on the same side here.” Though I imagined this must be terribly embarrassing for her and I took great pride in playing a part in that, I most certainly did not believe we were on the same side. I was on the side of those who are suffering. She was on the side of the ruling corporate class.
I mean, really? This is a man who personally campaigned against a proposed climate regulation that would have required DTE to use more renewables. This is a man who led a corporation that lies to the public about doing everything it can to restore power during outages while bragging to shareholders that it defers maintenance costs to increase profits. This is a man who represents a corporation that continues to fund fossil fuel projects while using dark money to lobby for anti-climate and anti-voter legislation.
Another one of the students who organized the event spoke to us afterward in his attempt to hear out our concerns. The student organizer expressed that in business, it takes a long time for things to change around climate, suggesting that we needed to be more patient with capitalism. He licked the corporate boot so hard that I worried for his oral health.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Pakistan and the magnitude of anguish people were experiencing. I silently raged while he spewed excuses for the slow progress in responding to climate change. What I felt in that moment threatened to consume me. There are moments in my life when I feel an impulse to wish ill on the most entitled, sheltered, and privileged people in the world. Do floods need to drown their loved ones too in order for them to understand the severity of the situation?
I know that neoliberals love to believe that #freemarket will correct externalities, and they especially love the hollow idea of #unity and #middleground. I, for one, don’t think there is a middle ground for climate justice when entire populations are being displaced and erased. It is very clear to me that our hegemonic economic system is responsible for environmental havoc in the Global South. Time wastes every second we don’t spend fighting for radical change.
On Undiplomacy
“Human Rights Watch and others have repeatedly documented how the Greek Coast Guard has abandoned migrants at sea by violently transferring individuals from Greek islands, or from the dinghy upon which they were traveling, to motorless, inflatable rafts, and leaving them adrift near Turkish territorial waters. They have also intercepted and disabled boats carrying migrants by damaging or removing the engines or fuel and towing them back to Turkey, or puncturing inflatable boats.” — Human Rights Watch, 2022
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The week that Russia invaded Ukraine, I was in Washington D.C. on a class trip. It was an advanced public policy seminar entitled “International Politics in Europe” in which students were assigned to each of three policy topic groups: energy security, democratic backsliding, and refugee rights. I was in the refugee rights group. We visited European embassies and unfortunately, hawkish think tanks to ask questions and gather insights for our class projects. A theme emerged during these visits: the current discourse regarding Ukranian refugees was vastly different from past discourse regarding refugees from Muslim-majority countries. Embassy officials admitted to us that the people in their countries were more likely to accept those who looked like them: light-haired and blue-eyed.
One of our visits took place at the Embassy of Greece where we were greeted by Ambassador Alexandra Papadopoulou.
During our question-and-answer session with her, I stepped on a landmine. “Could you respond to allegations that Greek Coast Guards are turning away migrants and setting them adrift?”
Her offense was severe. She fired off at me about how the allegations were Turkish propaganda. She reacted as though I had attacked all of Greece, which I found ridiculous. All countries (including our own) have grappled with human rights abuses, and diplomats must have the integrity to tactfully engage with these criticisms.
“To be clear, you’re saying that Coast Guards are not illegally setting adrift migrants? These pushbacks are not happening?”
“Do you think that all Greek Coast guards are criminals?” She said with contempt.
I mustered the tact she lacked and responded, “I wasn’t implying that.” But a lot of them probably are.
Instead of expressing any concern for the wellbeing of the migrants, she pointed to the inevitability of migrants dying across the world, denying any responsibility for what I had brought up. Sound logic, Ambassador Papadopolou – people die all the time so we should just let them die. You are right to shrug with indifference. After all, it’s not like you are in a position of power to do anything. Oh, wait.
She also launched into a tirade about migrants from the Middle East. “We don’t know what these migrants are bringing with them. Drugs, terrorism, crime.” In the same breath, she expressed her country’s embrace of Ukrainian refugees. “Sometimes, they don’t have their papers with them, and that’s okay. We still accept them.” Ah yes, the age-old adage of “brown people bad, white people good.”
Indeed, her words illuminated a form of anti-Muslim racism that permeates foreign policy. There is a firmly entrenched association of the Muslim body or the Muslim-adjacent body with violence and terrorism. Muslims do not have the privilege of innocence – they are cast as undeserving and unwanted. They are subjected to inhumane policies like being denied safe haven as they flee war and devastation. There the “ambassador” was, falling back on a narrative that drew a line between white refugees and refugees of color. She didn’t try to mask her biases – they were on full display. The idea of a racist diplomat should seem oxymoronic but I think Ambassador Papadopolou is shattering the glass ceiling there.
After our meeting concluded, one of my classmates eagerly expressed wanting to get a picture with her. Uh, was I the only one who caught that whole Muslims are latent terrorists thing?
Thinking that I was feeling distraught and regretful for asking such a pointed question, a few of my classmates tried to console me. I found myself feeling offended that people would try to console me – I would have preferred that they appreciated that I probed such a serious question about the human rights of refugees. I felt unapologetic for what I asked and how I asked it.
That night, another one of my classmates remarked to me, “I felt so bad for you.”
I snapped at her, “Really? Because you were nodding your head the whole time the ambassador was speaking.”
Does she think I am stupid and sightless? I vividly recall her nodding her head so hard through the ambassador’s racist tirade that I feared it would snap right off and tumble to the ground.
I have a hard time tolerating bullshit. There are many political ghouls who have somehow ascended to positions of power – I take no shame in troubling them, especially when I know for a fact, they are responsible for perpetuating and justifying mass suffering. I also take no shame in troubling my classmates who make me so angry sometimes that I want to grab them by the shoulders and shake them until the cloud of whiteness and uncritical thinking that has privileged them their whole lives finally dissipates.
While I was disappointed by some of my classmates, I was endlessly proud of myself. I joked in an Instagram caption that getting yelled at by the Greek ambassador for calling out a human rights violation was praxis. That, and a good lesson in undiplomacy.
On Anger II
Red colors the faces of oppression and the sneers of everyday life. Red is drawn by the whip that strikes the subjugated and the bullet that penetrates the body. Red are my eyes that witness.
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January 2023: Georgia State Patrol shot an Indigenous forest protector Tortuguita to death even though his hands were raised.
February 2023: North Carolina police officers tase a Black man named Darryl Tyree Williams to death even as he pleaded for them to stop because he had heart problems.
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March 2023: Police and hospital wokrers suffocate a Black man named Virgo Otieno to death after he was arrested and hospitalized during a mental health crisis.
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April 2023: An incarcerated Black man named LaShawn Thompson was found dead in his jail cell, eaten alive by insects.
There is something terribly wrong. I have been cautioned that anger damages the soul. I believe that anger gives me one in the first place.
On Union Busting
“And consider that while the violent labor repression of the pre-New Deal era may sound remote, a judicial injunction is by definition a broad and highly discretionary tool — violation of which would put workers or students in contempt of court, potentially subjecting them to jail time.” — U-M Law Professor Sanjukta Paul
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My head pounded against my skull, and I tried to summon the strength to endure it. The consequence of fasting during a high-stress situation was a monstrous headache that wouldn’t relent. I had insisted on fasting during the injunction hearing against my sister and best friend’s advice so that when I prayed to God that Judge Carol Kuhnke wouldn’t order striking graduate workers back to work, He would pay extra attention. If this injunction went through, it would severely harm labor across the state of Michigan. So I mouthed my prayers, softly rocking back and forth as I recited and repeated.
HasbunAllahu wa ni'mal wakeel, ni'mal maula wani'man naseer.
Allah is sufficient for us, and He is the Best Disposer of affairs. And (He is) the Excellent Protector and the Excellent Helper.
If you would have told me four years ago that in the final month of my senior year of college, I would be sitting on a courtroom bench, prepared to take the stand and testify as an undergraduate student on behalf of the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO) and against the University of Michigan administration, I don’t think I’d know how to react. But there I was with a sore tailbone, anxiously speculating about how I might be cross-examined by an attorney who bore a striking resemblance to Randall Boggs from Monsters Inc.
The courtroom was not what I imagined – it was airy and bright with large windows. We could hear strikers and allies outside the courtroom chanting about how union-busting was disgusting – it gave us in the courtroom the fortitude to sit through university attorneys Craig Schwartz and Sarah Nirenberg’s slimy tactics.
When I first walked into the courtroom, I spotted one of my classmates sitting inside. Given that this was the same student who argued in my class that IRS should audit low-income people as opposed to high-income people because the wealthy are already taxed so much, I was almost certain that he wasn’t there to cheer GEO on. I was correct.
He was the only undergraduate student that the university could find to testify against GEO. As I tried to neglect Nirenberg’s eye-sore of a dye job (if you’re going to pursue a lucrative legal career in union busting, you might as well fix up those roots), she tried to ask my classmate why he thought that other students would be unwilling to testify.
“I’m trying to help the court understand why there wouldn't be other witnesses in the court much like in a domestic violence case, why the witness might not be showing up to the court to provide some context, along with Mr. Schwartz’s context provided earlier this morning with respect to this sort of fear of retaliation.”
An expletive escaped from my mouth as our lawyer Mark Cousens jumped up in indignation.
“Your Honor, I strenuously object and move that remark be stricken. To accuse the union of such conduct without any record basis is absolutely sanctionable. And moreover, comparing a strike by hard-working people to domestic violence is truly an outrage. I am embarrassed for opposing counsel having done that, and I move it be struck.”
You know, it’s one thing for university lawyers to try to argue that irreparable injury has been done to the campus community as a result of the strike. But comparing striking workers who wanted a living wage and fair contract to domestic abusers who intimidate their victims into silence? That’s just a different level of nefariousness.
The university, with its billions and billions of dollars, would rather pour money into litigating its own workers and comparing them to abusers than addressing their serious material concerns. This is a school that prides itself on diversity, equity, and inclusion – three words that constantly make me want to roll my eyes into the back of my head. Our administration seems like it’s more concerned with the performance of social justice than the actual exercising of it. Grad workers want to be paid what they’re worth, they want disability accommodations, they want better access to trans health care, and higher childcare subsidies for parents.
The university lost the injunction – a historic win for the union – and as I write this essay, their strike persists. In their continued punitive course of action, the University docked the pay of anyone who didn’t fill out attestation forms about whether or not they were working. President Santa Ono even sicced the police on protesting grad workers while he was enjoying an expensive Ethiopian dinner.
As I watched the video of police officers cuffing two members of GEO, an inexplicable feeling filled me, something so raw that it made me shake. First, a court injunction with the threat of jail time, and now, President Ono, a man with a deeply troubling history of overseeing police violence during his tenure at the University of Cincinnati, mobilizing the police on his own workers? Indefensible.
I took to Twitter: “@SantaJOno I am the recipient of UofM’s MLK Spirit Award & UofM’s Marshall Scholarship nomination, & I am ashamed to call you my president. In fact, I’ve never felt more ashamed in my 4 years here than I do right now — you’re a spineless coward for arresting your own workers.”
The status quo of exploitation will no longer be tolerated by the workers and comrades of today. We are incensed to the point of no return and those at the top should fear our united power.
w0rds
Onward
“Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change. And when I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in those assumptions underlining our lives.
– “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” by Audre Lorde
What is the relationship between anger and liberation?
Anger gives us the agency and power to criticize the conditions we are subjected to. But anger is useless if not directed toward change.
I don’t know how anyone can exist in today’s world without feeling angry. If you pay close attention, you will grasp the ubiquity of injustice. We are conditioned into believing that institutions like policing and incarceration keep us safe while America refuses to shed its snakeskin of racialized enslavement. We are conditioned into believing that anyone can become rich if they just work hard enough while working people endure multiple jobs, crippling debt, and unrelenting depression. We are conditioned into believing that our military safeguards our freedoms while it ravages brown countries and bleeds them dry. These are all lies.
If red imbues the world, then hope gives it color and clarity. But just like anger, hope is useless if not directed toward change. Cesar Cruz famously said that “art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” Activism should do the same.
I have never been a defeatist. A more liberated world is possible, but only if we heed the lessons of the past and hold one another in solidarity. Only if we organize like tomorrow is not promised. It is not.
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