"Where life is precious, life is precious"

Building a world where nobody is expendable isn't naive, it's our only hope

I have been reading about the nation of Chad. My knowledge of that particular Central African country is so limited that even after multiple days studying its history and current political situation, I’d still struggle to point it out on an unlabeled world map. As is true in so many matters, I’m trying, but I still have a long way to go.

Depending on who is doing the counting, Chad either has the lowest life expectancy in the world or is pretty close to it. The average Chadian doesn’t even survive to see their fifty third birthday.

If I were to describe my politics, in a single sentence, “I want a world where everybody is able to live past their mid-fifties” would be a decent place to start.

There are a lot of reasons why the life expectancy in Chad is so chillingly low. Chadians die untimely deaths from malnutrition, malaria, AIDs and tuberculosis. They have been killed in various wars— both domestic conflicts as well as spillover violence from Nigeria and Sudan. The gunmen who kill Chadians have had many loyalties— FACT, the Union of Forces for Democracy and Development, Boko Haram, the Chadian military. They die the kind of deaths that people die in places where there isn’t money, where there isn’t basic infrastructure, where strongmen reign. Chad has no shortage of villains.

Zoom backwards, though, and there’s a single explanation as to why people in Chad often don’t live to see sixty. For centuries, Chadians have been considered expendable, specifically in the eyes of the White West. Like many of its West and Central African neighbors, Chad was colonized by France. In Chad’s case, France never took much interest in the actual people living in their conquered territory. There was more money to be made in neighboring colonies, so while Chad was a source of cotton and labor, colonial France instituted a policy of no-so-benign neglect within its borders. They generally couldn’t be bothered to build schools or hospitals or to pay attention to simmering ethnic and religious rivalries within the arbitrary lines they drew around the place. The stage was set for disaster, so it’s no surprise that disaster ensued.

The current situation in Chad is not as acutely terrifying as it is in Sudan or the Boko Haram controlled sectors of Nigeria. But “less acutely terrifying” is no grand accomplishment. A slowly festering wound still bleeds.

Chad has been on my mind these past few days because I’ve been thinking about the thousands of “that’s heartbreaking, but….” caveats that provide us with the moral cover to accept our immense inhumanity to one another. I’ve been thinking about the people who the world (especially the White world) once deemed worthless, but now are either ignored or pitied. “What are you going to do?” we shrug. “That’s just how society works.”

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These are, not surprisingly, Gaza-inspired thoughts. Last week, we collectively experienced the surreal un-reality of a temporary ceasefire, the silencing of some bombs, an exchange of some hostages, freedom for some prisoners. We were reminded, as the explosions and evacuations paused for a few precious days, that we can stop the bombs whenever we want, we can open up the jails whenever we want, we can imagine a different world whenever we want. There is no cosmic law that makes military assaults and carceral states inevitable. We just made those things up.

And then, just at the moment that we might have metabolized that lesson, the ceasefire was over. Israeli troops pressed deeper south into Gaza. Human beings killed other human beings once again.

The message, which I hope we ignore: That was all a dream. There will always be a war.

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There was a beautiful article in Jewish Currents last week. It was both an argument and a meditation. The author, Dan Berger, let the words of some of the families of Israeli hostages play around in his head for extra beat…

“Everyone for everyone.”

In its original form, the request was a plea from grieving loved ones for the Israeli government to negotiate a release of all prisoners on both sides of the border— all Israeli hostages for all Palestinian political prisoners. In his piece, Berger imagines the broader abolitionist vision inherent in that phrase. “Everyone for everyone,” becomes, over the course of his essay, a mirror of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s legendary entreaty that “where life is precious, life is precious.”

We are told, from so many different directions, that this is a naive way of looking at the world. We are told by governments with powerful militaries that we won’t be safe without their borders, bombs and blank checks to unleash horror. We are told on the left that liberation can only come if paramilitary gun thugs are allowed to mirror the cruelty of the states they are fighting against. We are told that our neighborhoods are only safer with more cops and more human beings behind bars.

If you want a world that cares about you, we’re reminded, somebody else will have to suffer.

Look what happens, though, when we allow ourselves to walk down the road of conditional humanity. Look what happens when we believe— even implicitly— that only some human lives are precious. We cause unspeakable harm in the present, and we set up dominos for even more unspeakable harm in the future.

This isn’t to say that there is no place in the world for disruptive, nonviolent resistance…in fact, there is a radical and urgent need for more of it. Nor is it a call to a world without accountability, reparations or restoration. It’s simply a reminder that you can’t buy your own heaven for the price of somebody else’s hell.

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This morning, I looked at my city’s crime statistics. Roughly 150 people have been murdered in Milwaukee, a city of roughly 500,000 people, this year. The tragedy isn’t the enormity of that number. What’s shocking is that, in comparative terms, this is good news. It means that, barring a heinous turn of events, far fewer people will have been murdered in Milwaukee this year than in the past year.

I live in a world where 150 murdered human beings in a single municipality is an improvement, a step in the right direction. What’s more, I live in a country where it’s impossible to imagine a 365 day stretch where, in a city the size of Milwaukee, nobody would murder their neighbor. This in spite of the fact that there are clear trends as to who lives and dies in a city like Milwaukee—trends rooted in race and class and gender that could be radically transformed if, as a society, we cared to build reparational safety nets and holistic networks of care.

There are policy solutions that would keep more or our neighbors alive. They are never seriously on the table, though,  not because we don’t have the capacity to love one another, but because puting that love into structural action would require change, risk, redistribution, and loss. It would require those of us who are most buoyed by the current system to accept new narratives about what keeps us safe, what advantages we’re entitled to, and how much of our lives get to be solely about ourselves.

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I know. This is so easy for me to say. I live my life at the intersection of every single privileged identity. My home has never been attacked. I’ve never been assaulted or had my body or personhood threatened. No reactionary legislator has ever tried to pass a law making my basic humanity illegal. You have to go back multiple hundreds of years to find any evidence of ethnic oppression against my ancestors. My religion has, with a few early colonial exceptions, always been fully accepted and affirmed in the country where I live. Of course I can call for a world without vengeance and punishment and a governmental or quasi-governmental force willing to disappear other human beings on our behalf. I’m not risking anything.

That’s very true. There’s no bravery in my words. There’s hardly any cognitive dissonance. That’s not true for many of you reading this—individuals for whom safety, protection and dignity has always been more tenuous. That’s why this essay isn’t actually a lecture. It’s a question. I imagine that you, like me, would love to live in a world where nobody is expendable. But if believing in that world—and what it would take to build it—feels impossible, I’d love for you to ask yourself why. And then, if you have the energy, I invite you to ask a few more questions.

What would make it easier to believe in that world?

What would I need from others to make believing in that world more realistic?

What can I give to others to make imagining that world easier for them as well?

I don’t pretend that building a better world will be frictionless or easy. I just know that the one we’re stuck with now requires, for its functioning, a belief in human expendability. And that’s the thing: I don’t believe that I’m expendable. I don’t believe that my loved ones are expendable. And I don’t believe that you’re expendable. And if that’s all true, then it’s not a matter of choosing to believe in a world beyond expendability. If I actually love all of you, then there’s literally no other option.

End notes:

Do you know what often helps you feel less alone and hopeless? Solidarity organizing.In whatever community is meaningful to you. Faith communities. Workplace communities. Local communities.

As for song of the week, you likely heard that Shane MacGowan of the Pogues died last week. It’s hard to think of an artist who more fully exemplified the dichotomy between a world of pain and imperfection (both societal and individual) and the human heart’s indefatigable capacity to hope that something better might be off in the distance. I made a personal (unlucky) top thirteen Pogues playlist and put it on Spotify and Apple Music. Enjoy!

Finally (and selfishly) thank you so much for everybody who has pre-ordered The Right Kind of White (and also filled out the thank you gift form). I am absolutely terrified about this book launch, which I recognize is a profoundly deeply privileged problem to have, particularly given the state of the world. That’s how a lot of life works, though, right? Trying to remain tethered to macro pain bur getting needlessly distracted by our own self-centered insecurities in the process. That’s to say, having a community of supporters around me has been such a beautiful gift in these heady post-writing/pre-release days. I truly appreciate you all.

Oh, and for everybody who read last week’s essay and became incredibly invested in Southeast Wisconsin’s regional pastry economy, here’s some very important seasonal Kringle news.