Courtesy Rebecca Solnit Show More Show Less 2 of 4 NEIGHBOR29-C-27JUN01-MG-LH--Rebecca Solnit, author of a history of walking, shows us around the Panhandle where she lives. The death of George Floyd was a match that lit a bonfire, and how the fuel for the bonfire piled up is worth studying. Its main offensives are well known, including the assertion that … tomdispatch.com — Rebecca Solnit arrived at Tomdispatch in May 2003 in a moment of relative silence with a piece entitled “Acts of Hope, Challenging Empire on a World Stage.” (It later morphed into the book Hope in the Dark, which certainly changed the way I look at the world.) What happens now is up to us, Trump's response to the pandemic has always been dishonest and cruel, Climate change, Covid – our hearts ache. Last modified on Thu 10 Dec 2020 10.21 EST. The status quo’s old excuses that change is impossible got smashed up in the torrent of change. Last week she updated it, “Our only hope for our collective liberation is a politics of deep solidarity rooted in love. The Trump era wasn't all bad. One more group deserves credit for the present moment: the police. Activist, journalist, writer, authority on everything from empathy to the history of walking — Rebecca Solnit is something of a Renaissance woman. And the protestors know it; they know that they are making history, and that the future is determined in part by the stories we tell in the present, and that those stories are not only words but names and monuments. Unfortunately, it's too little, too late, Biden's victory is only the prelude. By a 28-point margin, Civiqs finds that a majority of American voters support the movement, up from a 17-point margin before the most recent wave of protests began.” But that support followed Black Lives Matter; Black Lives Matter didn’t follow the support. Movements flourished – and won important battles, Republicans like Gabriel Sterling – who are horrified by the torrent of death threats facing electoral workers – are voicing their outrage very late in the day, We all have a role to play in persuading this administration to have more courage, go further and live up to its promises, The contemporary right has one central principle: rejecting any responsibility for others in the hollow name of freedom, I understand the temptation to feel that what is wrong now will be wrong forever. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and The Mother of All Questions. When historians fifty or a hundred years hence look back on these weeks of insurrection, they may see them as the point at which the old white America gave up the ghost and the coming nonwhite-majority country really began to take the reins. But anguish and hope can coexist, Growing up in San Francisco, the loudest, proudest queer town around, made it clear to me that gender was what you made of it. From Oakland to the avenue leading to the White House, streets have been inscribed BLACK LIVES MATTER and DEFUND THE POLICE in huge letters. Infections near 4.5m; Europe halts delivery of faulty Chinese face masks; WHO says Covid-19 may never go; this blog is now closed. American writer Rebecca Solnit has published 17 books since 1990, ranging from biography to cultural histories and art criticism to personal essays. The case that the police bring danger, escalation, and expense to many situations rather than peace and resolution is now far more widely accepted. On the Decades of Activism That Leads to Historic Change. In the midst of fear and isolation, we are learning that profound, positive change is possible, It’s a myth that wisdom comes only with age, the writer argues. Rebecca Solnit on Climate Change and How Political Activism Can Help Us Find Happiness The longtime writer and activist discusses the hope found in … Rebecca Solnit is a US Guardian columnist. River of Shadows. rebeccasolnit .net. Rebecca Solnit (born June 24, 1961) is a writer who lives in San Francisco, California.She has written on a variety of subjects, including the environment, politics, place, and art. This remaking of the public landscape has been going on for years with the taking down of Confederate statues and flags and other racist statues and names across the country—thus it was that after the massacre of black churchgoers in Charleston by a white supremacist South Carolina finally took down its Confederate flag (after black-rights activist Bree Newsome Bass scaled the capitol’s flagpole and took the flag down), that New Orleans took down the statue of Robert E. Lee and some of the most egregious other confederate monuments a few years ago, and at the University of North Carolina students toppled the Confederate “Silent Sam” statue. To the frustration and desperation of people who had been locked up and financially crushed by the pandemic and had seen Covid-19, thanks to structural racism, become increasingly a disease of black and brown people. Almost all are followers, and they should be if they are to be representatives. Rebecca Solnit can be most persuasive not when dispensing feminist credos but when she is studying the fine grain of intimate experience. And so it is with this moment. Rebecca Solnitlives in San Francisco and is the author of several books, including A Field Guide to Getting Lost and, most recently, Storming the Gates of Paradise. They struck the match that lit the bonfire. Rebecca Solnit Essays. And finally there is something mysterious about why something happens at this moment and not that—in this case why the response to the police killing of George Floyd is so much larger than previous reactions, and why it is having such a widespread impact on Americans understanding of racism. All rights reserved. Her last article for Harper’s Magazine , “The Uses of Disaster,” appeared in the October 2005 issue. Rebecca Solnit on Growing Up, Growing Whole, and How We Compose Ourselves “Growing up, we say, as though we were trees, as though altitude was all that there was to be gained, but so much of the process is growing whole as the fragments are … When they are a consensus idea, that’s the end of the insurrection, or the waterfall, and politicians are smoothing things over and people have accepted the idea that they at first resisted, whether it’s the abolition of slavery or the right to marriage equality. Because her work is … A rightwing mob attempted the coup in the form of a violent riot that stormed the Capitol building. The Faraway Nearby. Immigrants locked up in a detention camp in Bakersfield, California, went on hunger strike in solidarity with the protests. Men Explain Things to Me. They act without regard for consequences. The consequences of this uprising are too many to count. Over the last two weeks, support for Black Lives Matter increased by nearly as much as it had over the previous two years, according to data from Civiqs, an online survey research firm. The consequences of this uprising are too many to count. CNN reported on June 9, “that 67% of Americans believe the criminal justice system favors white people over black people in this country. We saw progress – thanks to social movements, Dear America: writer, thinkers and activists on how to build a better country, The violence at the Capitol was an attempted coup. The metaphor of the river of time is often used to suggest that history flows at a steady pace, but real rivers have rapids and shallows, eddies and droughts. We, the NFL, admit we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and…believe Black Lives Matter.”  These expedient gestures were done out of a sense of necessity that marks something more important than their good will would have: the world has changed. Not in the sense of planning it or expecting these events, but by having changed their minds and committed their hearts beforehand. And since the death of George Floyd in police custody on May 25, public opinion on race, criminal justice and the Black Lives Matter movement has leaped leftward. Rebecca Solnit laments that economic competition from young technocrats has made it hard for ‘dissidents, queers, pacifists and experimentalists … writers, artists, activists, environmentalists [and] eccentrics’ to find homes in San Francisco (LRB, 7 February).What she doesn’t mention is how difficult living there has become for families with children. Minneapolis, where all this started, actually voted to abolish the police department, and dozens of cities, from Los Angeles to New York, voted to cut funding to the police and in many cases narrow their mission. Old Conflicts, New Chapters, Your support powers our independent journalism, Available for everyone, funded by readers, Looking back over the past four years, there wasn’t just rightwing repression. The celebrated American essayist Rebecca Solnit is often wrongly credited with coining the word “mansplaining.” She was, though, the first to popularise the term in a 2008 essay about a man at a party in Aspen who explained her own book on the Victorian photographer Eadweard Muybridge to her. By Rebecca Solnit. © 2021 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and The Mother of All Questions. They themselves have made a fantastic case for defunding or abolition—at least as they currently exist. She has written 13 books, including 2004’s River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, which won a Book Critics Circle Award in criticism and a Lannan Literary Award. Time accelerates, things change faster than anyone expected, water clear as glass becomes churning whitewater, what was thought to be impossible or the work of years is accomplished in a flash. The civil unrest has shifted and grown and had extraordinary effect. D isasters begin suddenly and never really end. Rebecca Solnit is a US Guardian columnist. by Rebecca Solnit. Article: Rebecca Solnit: The Longest War - The Republican 'war on women' helped define 2012. Photograph by David Levenson / Getty It’s about an Icelandic eco-saboteur who blows up rural power lines and hides in scenic spots from helicopters hunting her and is … Rebecca Solnit on Donald Trump’s fear of women. She has written over a dozen books and numerous articles and essays on the American West, gender, urbanism, Rebecca Solnit is the author of many books including "A Field Guide to Getting Lost," "River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West" and "Hope in … January 19, 2017. It is often said of the writer Rebecca Solnit that her work “resonates.” It’s hard to find an article about her that doesn’t include that word. One of … Small gatherings keep popping up in rural California towns, remote, tiny Baker, Nevada, in Paris, Texas, the Great Plains, and in other places where the crowds are largely or entirely white. Because they thought they could not themselves burn, and that they were indispensable. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity. In New Mexico statues of the conquistador Onate, who brutalized the native population, are coming down. Suddenly life changed; institutions from schools to air travel largely shut down; the federal government pulled three trillion dollars out of thin air and threw it around; nearly everyone changed their daily life. Website. Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) is an American writer. And this too prepared the way for what is happening now. I was also freaked out by the coverage of it: you know, the reports of viciousness, mayhem, and murder. It wasn’t until 2008, after a friend casually suggested that Solnit write an essay about the then-unnamed phenomenon of mansplaining, that Solnit caught the public eye as a female writer—as opposed to a writer who happened to be female. And at last there were consequences where there had been none. People around the world have risen up in solidarity and in many cases found an occasion to address racism in their own society and its public landscape. I felt a little bit anxious about my very positive view of human nature in the piece. In the USA, many Confederate monuments have come down, and the ever-magnificent Elizabeth Warren attached a rider to a defense authorization bill to rename military bases currently named after Confederates, which raises the question of why the hell they got those names in the first place. And the same percent say that racism is a big problem today, compared to just 49% in 2015, a year after [Michael] Brown’s death in Ferguson… Those findings were echoed in a recent Monmouth University poll that found 57% of Americans believe police are more likely to use excessive force against black people—up from 34% in 2016.” And then the report cited a Republican pollster who exclaimed, “In my 35 years of polling, I’ve never seen opinion shift this fast or deeply. The words in that debate mattered, as did their delivery. Rebecca Solnit on the map “City of Women,” from her forthcoming book “Nonstop Metropolis,” co-authored with Joshua Jelly-Schapiro. Now it must be defended and implemented, and protected from both backlash and that dreary dragging resistance to change that makes the river sluggish. I still don’t know why Sallie and I bothered to go to that party in the forest slope above Aspen. Rebecca is an author based in San Francisco, California. Thus has a statue of Columbus been thrown into a Minneapolis lake, another Columbus came down in Richmond, Virginia, a third in Boston, and  a fourth in Detroit. The Bonfire. She has written on a variety of subjects, including feminism, the environment, politics, place, and art. They advocated “say those things that everyone is already comfortable with, aim low, don’t rock the boat.” The best ideas that change the world emerge from the shadows and the margins; they are at first ignored, then regarded with alarm or disdain by many outside those zones, and they work their way inward. They are where ideas end up, not where they start. A great public change is the ratification of innumerable small private changes; the bonfire is a pile of these small changes lit by some unforeseen event. Rebecca Solnit’s CINDERELLA LIBERATOR (Haymarket, 48 pp., $17.99; ages 6 and up) applies subtle shifts and gentle questions to recast this familiar story … Those offering unsolicited advice about #defundthepolice were also mistaken about how change works. Chateaubriand said something similar of the French Revolution, that it “was accomplished before it occurred.”. Rebecca Solnit arrived at Tomdispatch in May 2003 in a moment of relative silence with a piece entitled “Acts of Hope, Challenging Empire on a World Stage.” (It later morphed into the book Hope in the Dark, which certainly changed the way I look at the … Call it that, Republicans are standing up to Trump. Nationwide, with the whole world watching, these civil servants showed they use public funds to brutalize, murder, and deny the constitutional rights of members of that public. The invasion of Iraq was already two months old. It is an ongoing mistake to refer to politicians as leaders. Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. They freeze over and get dammed and their water gets diverted. Rebecca Solnit finds solace, inspiration, and teachings in landscapes both rural and urban, from the beach at low tide to homeless people on the street. Political scientist Erica Chenoweth of the Crowd Counting Consortium says that for sheer number of places and participants this is the biggest protest in US history. It was both a kind of tone policing and a tone deafness about the fact that the people who feared being killed by the police—or mourning those who were—were impatient, six years after the shooting of Michael Brown Jr. and seven after the birth of Black Lives Matter. In recent days, we’ve seen what it looks like when people of all races, ethnicities, genders and backgrounds rise up together, standing in solidarity for justice, protesting, marching and singing together, even as SWAT teams and tanks roll in. Or a waterfall. Since the release of “Men Explain Things to Me,” the author who was once known for her sharp commentary on art, nature, and literature has become a de … For an embodiment of the word singlehanded you might turn to the heroine of the recent movie Woman at War. While all this actual living out of the mandates to #abolishthepolice and #defundthepolice was happening way too many mostly white people around me fussed that #defundthepolice was scary and incoherent and proposed exactly the kind of polite language for reform that has accomplished little in recent years. It is an ongoing mistake to refer to politicians as leaders. An elementary school in Berkeley named after a slaveowner was renamed after civil rights hero Sylvia Mendez a couple of years ago. Rebecca Solnit (second from right) at the San Francisco Women’s March on January 19, 2019. But these high-profile places and actions should not overshadow how vast this uprising is: yes there are huge crowds in big cities, and not only in the USA but in London, Paris, Rome—but there are also thousands of small protests in small places. More by this contributor. A few months ago, I went to record a television show about politics. — Rebecca Solnit, August 19, 2012 . Women told me they had flashbacks to hideous episodes in their past after the second presidential debate on 9 October, or couldn’t sleep, or had nightmares. Rebecca Solnit, an award-winning writer and “anti-memoirist,” grew up in Novato in the 1960s and 70s. By Rebecca Solnit. Gradually, more people who regarded women as people whose rights mattered and voices should be heard had come to play a role the news, the courts, the universities, and it mattered. April 2, 2019. Almost all are followers, and they should be if they are to be representatives; unfortunately this country is so skewed by the power of money that most represent more conservative positions than their constituents. But none of these would have signified if the smallest thing hadn’t happened millions of times over: people changed their minds. By Rebecca Solnit. [1] Solnit is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, where bi-monthly she writes the magazine's "Easy Chair" essay. A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Early on people who preferred order to justice carped that riots never change anything, and then out of this uprising monumental change came. I. But a new era is possible. Occupy was immensely effective as it spread across the world, and in the US it reshaped the conversation about the economy in ways that still matter. It wasn’t a beginning, but a culmination, of decades of work by feminists that resulted in people who believed women deserved equal rights, power, and valuation began to be in charge—to some extent—of what stories got told, who got believed. They disrupted the proceedings that would have completed the recognition of the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. During the question-and-answer period that followed it, the subject that seemed to most interest a number of people was whether Woolf should have had children. Rebecca Solnit I was very distressed about what was happening in New Orleans and was following it intently, like a lot of other people were. 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We’ve seen our faces in another American mirror — a reflection of the best of who we are and what we can become.”, Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature. Statues commemorate the victors—which is why the US has been an upsidedown country all these 155 years since the Civil War supposedly ended, one in which the antislavery north supposedly won the war, but the south has celebrated itself as though it did. June 17, 2020. They care less for human life than for property. The New York Times reported on June 10, “Public opinion on race and criminal justice issues has been steadily moving left since the first protests ignited over the fatal shootings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. Her most recent book is Whose Story Is This? Or in the case of the young, grew up with minds shaped by something better than the obliviousness and indifference that passed as not being racist in my own youth. They were largely Indigenous as far as I could tell in Utqiagvik, Alaska, the northermost town in the USA—and that’s how I found out that the town formerly known as Barrow had decolonized its name in late 2016. A Paradise Built in Hell. In 2018, New York City got rid of a statue of a racist gynecologist in Central Park; in 2019 plans were laid to erect a statue of Black congresswoman and presidential candidate Shirley Chisolm in Brooklyn. That is, for a national and international uprising against anti-Black racism and police violence to achieve such scale and power, many must have been ready for it, whether they knew it or not. Looking back on the American Revolution, this country’s second president,  John Adams reflected, “The revolution was in the minds of the people, and in the union of the colonies, both of which were accomplished before hostilities commenced.” Adams was a waffler on slavery, both opposed to it and opposed to strong measures to abolish it, but he offers a useful description of how change works: the revolution was in consciousness; the war with Britain was just an outcome of it. There is a danger of believing, as the Republican pollster seemed to, that this happened all at once, rather than that something slowly growing and changing suddenly became visible. Watch this 1964 conversation between Chinua Achebe, Lewis Nkosi, and Wole Soyinka. By Rebecca Solnit, I gave a talk on Virginia Woolf a few years ago. The case that the police bring danger, escalation, and expense to many situations rather than peace and resolution is now far more widely accepted. Young women and girls offer new tools to use, She’s overcome misogyny, billionaires’ wrath, and media smears to get to the front of the race, and she brings a special brand of Big Structural Mom Energy, From Black Lives Matter and #MeToo to school climate strikes, the power of popular movements can no longer be ignored, says journalist and author Rebecca Solnit. The death of George Floyd was a match that lit a bonfire, and how the fuel for the bonfire piled up is worth studying. This had already happened in a way with the pandemic. And sometimes the river comes to the precipice and we’re all in the waterfall. One might imagine they’d have wanted to be careful in the wake of the Floyd murder, but they went on a spectacular display of their own sense of immunity by—well, shooting out the eyes of eight people with “sublethal” weapons, managing to blind a photojournalist in one eye; attacking and arresting dozens of members of the media at work, especially nonwhite ones; San Jose police shooting their own anti-bias trainer in the testicles; knocking over an old man who’s still in critical condition as a result (yeah the one Trump theorized must be Antifa); teargassing children; pointing weapons at other small children; and generally showing us that the only people the police protect are the police. One more group deserves credit for the present moment: the police. by Rebecca Solnit. To the years of simmering disgust and rage against the white supremacist destructiveness of Donald J. Trump. REBECCA SOLNIT: As I wrote the essay, I realized that not being believed becomes a life-and-death matter. Too many pundits and amnesiacs framed that as something that began then and there. They themselves have made a fantastic case for defunding or abolition. She is passionate about spreading awareness of climate change, a cause in which she sees great advancements. The IPCC report recommends urgent work on many fronts – from how we produce food and to what use we put land (more forests) to how we generate and use energy (and the unsexy business of energy efficiency also matters). For those who were not directly impacted by decades and centuries of racist police violence this great uprising underway is about a long-overdue critical mass of solidarity with the fury and frustration of those directly impacted. You can point to specifics about this moment—the horrific brutality of Floyd’s public death by lynching at the hands of the police. We are a different country today than just 30 days ago.” But the change in consciousness didn’t happen overnight, or over 30 days; it happened over years, and the organizers—most especially Black Lives Matter, founded in 2013—deserve credit for building this. In a waterfall moment the movement from margin to center accelerates. She described a revolutionary transformation more powerful than resistance. Impatient and not looking for messaging lessons from white people. The willful incomprehension and disapproval brought back the early days of Occupy Wall Street, when pundits and purse-lipped onlookers were calling the insurrectionary gatherings incoherent and incomprehensible and demanding to know what the demands were, imagining the occupiers as supplicants, not people in earnest conversation with each other about what the alternative to economic injustice might look like. Cities all over the country are defunding the police, and somehow the case has been made in the press, as never before, that militarized men with guns and the propensity to use them too often are the often the worst people to send out to do social work, crisis intervention, and mental health counseling, and that there are better ways to do these things.

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