Political/personal
When Elizabeth Warren announced the end of her presidential campaign, I was sitting in my office. I got a text from a friend, saying, “NPR is reporting she dropped? Is it so? I haven’t gotten on Twitter. I don’t wanna.” I understood the sentiment. The last few days leading up to the primary election and the days afterward had been vitriolic on Twitter, to say the least. On a day that felt as raw as the last day of the last female presidential candidate’s campaign, neither of us wanted to bathe ourselves in hot takes or the righteous indignation of Bernie supporters. Her loss felt personal to us.
Later, I texted back to the same friend, “We’re 3 days away from International Women’s Day, and with Liz dropping out and the way things are right now…it all just makes me want to cry.” Liz’s loss takes place several weeks after yet another report I labored over for our department about the state of sexism in my graduate program and at my university. This year, my third year of my PhD, I’ve written two reports and attended countless meetings about the needs of female grad students in my department and how to address them. Last year, I filed a Title IX report for sexual harassment. The weariness I feel over what it means to be a woman in America, a female academic in America, runs into the core of my soul.
The day Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the presidential election, I was in my final year of undergrad. I wore all black the next day to my classes. I didn’t think Hillary was a perfect candidate (neither is Elizabeth, for the record), but it didn’t change the way that my fate felt, and continues to feel, entwined with theirs—sociologist Nolan Cabrera calls this “linked fate”, or the belief that our well-being is tied up in the well-being of others. I did see myself in Hillary a little, but it was the criticisms of Hillary’s personality that felt the most personal: that she didn’t smile enough, that she wasn’t warm enough, that she was intimidating, that she was cold or a bitch. At the time, I was attempting activist work as an undergrad at a private Christian university, and the critiques leveraged against me were often gendered along the lines of my being bitchy, cold, or angry. To hear the general public lob these labels at Hillary only reinforced the sense that others would never take me seriously or treat me with respect because of my gender.
I was visiting another grad student office in our department the day of Brett Kavanaugh’s congressional hearings. The discussion reached the topic of the new incoming cohort, and how one man of color everyone liked didn’t get into the program. “It’s because of your cohort,” a (white, male) grad student said to my friend and I with a laugh. “Your cohort (the first majority female grad cohort in our department’s history) makes up for the lack of diversity in the department. We won’t need any more ‘diverse’ grad students until after you graduate.” My friend’s entire body tensed up next to me as my shoulders sagged. In that moment, I decided that I was done tolerating sexist nonsense in my presence. Without another word, I said goodbye and slipped out of their office, back to my apartment and my exhausted fury.
The personal is political, they say. Issues of individuals are writ large on the canvas of national social policy—healthcare, childcare, mass incarceration, employment inequality; trans rights, disability rights, and abortion rights all have individual, micro-level implications for each of us and the decisions we make. This is all very, very true. What I want to add, and what folks more marginalized than me already know, is that the political is also personal. The rhetoric, the bullying, the hearings, the votes; when Mitch McConnell criticized Elizabeth Warren by saying, “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted”; the deafening silence among most candidates on issues of Native sovereignty, universal childcare, trans rights, disability rights, and prison and ICE abolition; the ways our country still refuses to elect a person whose gender represents at least 45% of the population; these are all deeply personal, felt like needles to the heart. To have your needs and humanity erased, ignored, or mocked is hurtful at best and devastating at worst. The implications can even end lives.
Nevertheless, we continue on, and alongside us the backdrop of the political hangs, sometimes hopefully, most of the time far less so. The personal is eternally entwined with the political, knitted into one fabric, their linked fates moving us all forward into an unknown future.