The Dark Knight Rises: Black Existential Anxiety in the age of Trump
One
B: You don’t fear death, you welcome it.
Your punishment must therefore be more severe.
BM: Torture?
B: Yes. But not of your body. Of your soul.
Barely one week before the publication of this blog, I wrote a piece around black existentialism, offering the opening salvo into a reimagining, or really an intersectional broadening, of how we view death. Death, for people of colour as I said there, is a constant. We walk in close proximity to it. From the erasure of our identities, of our humanity, we are seen as less than, a form of existential death. From the erasure of our rights to our actual physical death at the hands of police, and medical and psychological practitioners through the misdiagnosis of our illnesses, we live intimate lives in the orbit of the spectre of death.
Within a week of that blogs publication, what we have seen is not only the emergence of a black woman as the leader of the farthest right conservative party I have witnessed in my lifetime, but we have also, and perhaps more importantly seen the reemergence of donald trump as the leader of the United States of America. The repercussions of this second incident, in particular, have been felt across the world. In the rejection of the rights of women to govern their own bodies, in the growing rejection of identities of many within the LGBTQ communities, in the rejection of the racial rights of non-white persons who crave respect and equality, all across America, a darkness has fallen which has sent shockwaves across the planet.
Yet, this has been planned out for years, and so many who chose not to believe this will come to pass will now have to face this reality. Project 2025, the Trumpian Wishlist for this second term in office, is a horrifying read, for those who have scanned its pages (Wendling, 2024). An ultra-conservative drive towards fascism, this paper looks to install loyalists in all levels of government, to deport millions of migrants from the USA and to put in place a number of isolationist policies which will limit trade with other nations whilst promoting trade at home. The rights of the planet will be at stake as well, as trumps America becomes the world’s largest climate denier, are at stake, as is the fate of a Europe faced with an angry Russian bear which has busily been manipulating elections in Moldova and Georgia, whilst waging a landgrab war in Ukraine. Do not think this ‘project’ is something which will end with just the USA. If this fully comes to pass, this horror is something which will be mimicked in populist nations across the globe for generations to come.
The bleakness and the anxiety provoked by this month’s blog, of these few paragraphs, is therefore to emphasise just some of what is faced by all of us over the next four years (and I will argue beyond, as this has been a long time in the construction). It is a clarion call to all groups, to all identities, to take a time out, to sit with, then to do their thing, small or large, to build that lattice of change we all want to see.
Two
This should be agony.
But I am a man of thirty, of twenty again.
The rain on my chest is a baptism
I am born again.
I am blessed to work with a good number of colleagues, both close and far away, who have been in touch over the past week or so. Their messages though were always the same. They always held the shock, sadness, and anger, of what had happened. The reminder of their place in the world, be they women, gay, lesbian or trans, disabled, South Asian, Black, the messages I received always held the same kinds of messaging. There was disbelief. How could this happen? They asked. What is America doing? They proclaimed.
One particular brilliant colleague on LinkedIn reminded me of the work of Mbembe (2016) whose contemporary writings around decoloniality and the link between colonisation and existentialism I highly recommend. For this blog, what particularly stands out for me in his work, is the exploration of the intersections between death and colonialism/decolonisation, together with the rise or return of fascism with its four horsemen of the apocalypse, racism, sexism, homophobia and nationalism (although I will concede there will be others as well).
In other works of Mbembe’s, whilst he wisely states that racism has evolved, my own view is that white supremacy, to borrow from hooks ideas, was never about colour (2016). This is something we saw in the results of this horrific election result; that when faced with the projected anxiety of losing their jobs migrants, be they Black or Latin would rather vote for a white supremacist than stand up and listen to their own moral cores.
Fascism and white supremacy have always had within them the idea of a superior ideal, that one group (they) are the pinnacle, and that other groups should remain subservient to them. Yet, in order to manipulate and maintain this systemic superiority, there has also always needed to be another group of acolytes, a secondary class who would both believe in the words of wisdom (the lies and deception) emergent from white supremacist mouths. The overseers, for example, who were always way crueller in the treatment of the slaves, did so because they believed in the edicts passed down by their masters.
As a black scholar, presenting such emotive and stimulating work in a time of the return of Trumpism, there is no surprise in what we are witnessing right now. Yet, I understand why so many are driven back to feeling such deep emotional distress at this time. We hoped. We went to sleep and we hoped. We hoped that we were safe. That those who we had given power over to look after us, would do the right things by us. We lived in the mirage of political hope. And now we feel betrayed.
Or are we. Hope by its very nature is not mans to give. It is not down to a strongman character who says he will look after us to do so, especially when 1,200,000 million people in the USA alone died during the recent Covid-19 pandemic (in the UK the number was 230,000). In divesting ourselves of our responsibility for saving ourselves, of giving hope over to people who misled us for their own means, we are complicit in the oppressions of the far right. Just like those black men who voted for trump, of those LGBTQ persons who voted for trump, of those women who voted for trump, we are dangerously complicit.
Three
You’re playing the wrong game, the old game.
Tonight, you’re taking no hostages.
Tonight, I’m taking no prisoners.
Change does not come from an avoidance of existential anxiety, and the giving over of hope to a central ideal. It comes from the artists, the activists, and the changemakers, from those whose lives are often riven by the sea of existential anxiety they reside within. It is emergent from sitting within the discomfort, from the depths of pain we feel, which echo that which we all feel and endure, and using our skills to bring up, to bring forth, words, pictures, music and actions which create dissonance, which bring change. It comes from us. It comes from me.
So how am I? Well, I am angry. This isn’t the anger of someone who wants to literally burn it all down, to knock someone out, or to self-harm with food. This anger, this harnessed anger in this instance is a good thing. This is the anger which went into the notes I wrote at 4am (UK time) on Wednesday the 6th of November when the true horror of the political picture of became clearer. This is the anger which went into the food I cooked later that morning before work, a meal prepared for later when I had to collect my daughter, a meal for us to savour.
This is the anger which goes into my art. It is in the music I’ve been listening to these past few days (from old PE and Dre to Linkin Park and Five Finger Death Punch), to the books I’ve chosen to read (Daredevil: Born Again to the Dark Knight Returns). It is the anger which took me out for my morning run on the day I wrote this blog, a jog along the seafront where I could smell the sea air, watch the whitecaps of the waves as they caressed the beach, and feel the sea salt blast my skin.
This is the anger which drives me to stand up and fight back. It is the fire which connects me to myself and reconnects me to all of you reading this piece today. That takes hope away from someone claiming to be our hero, who will look after ourselves, and returns it back to where it belongs. To each and every one of us. Heroes rising. Focal points for each other. Because in reality that is all a hero is. A focal point for change, for those who want to come together to create change.
In the writing of this piece, these 1500 words written in 90 minutes, this anger, this fire is my way of saying one simple thing.
No more!
Four
I want you to remember,
In all the years to come,
In your most private moments,
I want you to remember,
The one man who beat you!
References
Hooks, B. (2016). Feminism is for everybody. In Ideals and Ideologies: A Reader. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315625546
Mbembe, A. (2016). Necropolitics. Duke University Press.
Wendling, M. (2024). Project 2025: The right-wing wish list for another Trump presidency. BBC News Online. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c977njnvq2do