A friend just finished a round of cancer treatment. I live in rural TN where almost everybody is a Trumper. This neighbor had to travel to a larger city to get treatment. When it was finished, his wife gave the credit to Jesus! I tried to politely remind her that many, many actually existing humans had participated in his care and cure. Most of them were probably female and many of them may have been brown and not born in the USA. I guess it's hard to give those people any credit at all, especially when you know you are completely dependent on them for your very life.
Similarly, a very elderly family member, a former doctor, is now completely dependent on black women to stay alive. He was a Trump supporter until Jan 6. All his life, he has made it clear that women and black people are not equal to white men like himself, but now, he begs them not to desert him! I don't think he really thinks about the contradictions here. Perhaps there IS no contradiction. In Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything, the authors write about the fact that in European societies, care and violence were intertwined: domination within the household, backed up by the threat of violence, ensured care for the dominators. (They contrast this with some North American indigenous societies, where violence within the clan/family/tribe was considered unthinkable; it was only directed outword at outsiders.)
My grandma was cared for by a very kind African American lady who was a nurse married to a local church minister. One of my great aunt’s health care aides was a very kind Black lady who cared for her overnight. She admitted to me once that her only vice was that she liked to gamble a little bit.
Tempting (not to say somewhat comforting) to chalk it up as another symptom of imperial decline and fall - a regime at war with everything and everybody (except the reproduction of its cocooned super-elites and technopolicing apparatus), even at war with the structural drivers (potential or actual) of its own social and economic growth. Imperial seppuku, with the attendant bread and circuses. Happens to ‘em all.
A friend just finished a round of cancer treatment. I live in rural TN where almost everybody is a Trumper. This neighbor had to travel to a larger city to get treatment. When it was finished, his wife gave the credit to Jesus! I tried to politely remind her that many, many actually existing humans had participated in his care and cure. Most of them were probably female and many of them may have been brown and not born in the USA. I guess it's hard to give those people any credit at all, especially when you know you are completely dependent on them for your very life.
Similarly, a very elderly family member, a former doctor, is now completely dependent on black women to stay alive. He was a Trump supporter until Jan 6. All his life, he has made it clear that women and black people are not equal to white men like himself, but now, he begs them not to desert him! I don't think he really thinks about the contradictions here. Perhaps there IS no contradiction. In Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything, the authors write about the fact that in European societies, care and violence were intertwined: domination within the household, backed up by the threat of violence, ensured care for the dominators. (They contrast this with some North American indigenous societies, where violence within the clan/family/tribe was considered unthinkable; it was only directed outword at outsiders.)
My grandma was cared for by a very kind African American lady who was a nurse married to a local church minister. One of my great aunt’s health care aides was a very kind Black lady who cared for her overnight. She admitted to me once that her only vice was that she liked to gamble a little bit.
Tempting (not to say somewhat comforting) to chalk it up as another symptom of imperial decline and fall - a regime at war with everything and everybody (except the reproduction of its cocooned super-elites and technopolicing apparatus), even at war with the structural drivers (potential or actual) of its own social and economic growth. Imperial seppuku, with the attendant bread and circuses. Happens to ‘em all.