Y’all . . .
For more than 18 months we listened to MAGATs like Donald Trump, JD Vance, Ted Cruz, Tommy Tuberville, Mike Rogers, Laura Loomer, Nancy Mace, Natalie Baldassarre, Ron DeSantis and others unleash a nasty barrage of Islamophobic attacks against Michigan Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed.
They called him “very, very evil,” a “terrible evil,” “terrorist,” “radical Islamist,” “jihadist leprechaun,” a “Muslim Brotherhood member,” “on the side of the terrorists,” someone who would spread Sharia law, and would need to pass through a metal detector to enter the Senate. One Republican spokesperson said he belonged in Guantanamo Bay rather than Congress. They ran attack ads linking him to Hamas militants, and said that he and every other Muslim holding public office is a “trojan horse” and national security threat.
They spent months portraying this American-born Muslim as an existential threat to the republic while cheering on an evil authoritarian regime that’s been busy ripping families apart, terrorizing communities, killing people, destroying millions of livelihoods, stealing money, gutting civil rights protections, weaponizing the federal government, trampling constitutional protections, and treating cruelty like a governing philosophy.
But now that El-Sayed has beaten their asses at the ballot box, these same racists wanna talk about some damn unity and reaching across the aisle to heal divisions.
Look at that front page cover of that The New York Post edition published the day after the midterms. The headline reads: “Abdul El-Sayed used victory speech to taunt ‘enemies’ rather than heal divisions after ugly campaign.”
Heal what and with who exactly?
The nerve of these people. After an openly Islamophobic campaign, the headline complains about El-Sayed deliciously celebrating his victory over “the bad guys” who demonized the hell out of him instead of tending to their fragile white feelings.
Why the hell should El-Sayed or any of the rest of us targeted by this regime be expected to extend an olive branch or sympathy or healing or some forgiveness to people who spent months attacking him? And don’t tell me that the Republicans would be delivering these same fraudulent sermons about unity and reconciliation if they had won. There was zero concern about healing when El-Sayed was being smeared as a terrorist and there were calls to do violence against him.
I’m so damn sick of this obsessive ritual of demanding handholding and placing the burden of civility and reconciliation on people who are constantly targeted while letting powerful people escape the consequences of what they’ve done.
This country has a pathological relationship with reconciliation and keeps treating unity as a virtue independent of justice. Calls for “unity” and “healing” and “reconciliation” are central mechanisms through which white supremacy has historically and continues to reproduce and preserve itself. This is a country that has been very astute at restoring social peace without doing the work of dismantling the racial hierarchies that made violence possible in the first place. One only need to study the Civil War and how in its aftermath, reconciliation between white Northerners and white Southerners came at the expense of Black freedom, citizenship and safety from racial terror.
White supremacy is so fucking devious. In political moments like this, it likes to play tricks by redefining justice as divisiveness, accountability as revenge, and the refusal to forgive as a greater moral offense than the original violence. When you hear these demands for healing, please know that it is a weapon that is requiring those injured to demonstrate moral generosity and prove their humanity through forgiveness. In this kind of arrangement, unity is not the achievement of justice, but rather the restoration of an unequal social order that never gets dismantled.
Many folks genuinely believe that white supremacy reproduces itself across generations primarily through hateful ideologies and virulent brutality. But it also gets sustained through the ritual absolution of those who wield power and through the systematic delegitimization of freedom fighters who demand that power be held accountable.
Now, I’m no psychologist but I do believe there’s also some deeply sinister psychology behind these ritualistic demands for unity and healing. The folk making these calls aren’t at all invested in repairing the harm done to marginalized groups. No, they need to relieve themselves of psychological discomfort, whether they inflicted it, enabled it, or stood by and did nothing while it happened. These kinds of people want reconciliation and healing because accountability threatens their image of themselves as decent people. They truly believe that their country is fundamentally good, and that whatever evil atrocities went down were just unfortunate exceptions rather than expressions of the very systems they defend.
So they demand forgiveness because they need to escape all that guilt. They say we gotta unify so there are no consequences and they can restore their innocence without having to earn it from us. And when the injured refuse to participate in this emotional laundering, then our anger and bitterness becomes the problematic division. When you think about it, I mean really think about it, this is a psychological sleight of hand where the people who caused the injuries demand to be comforted by those who are still enduring the pain and trying their best to survive.
I have long argued that in racist America, forgiveness and reconciliation are politically dangerous because neither ever comes with repentance, restitution, reparations, or radical structural change. Instead, forgiveness and reconciliation are instruments of social control. And marginalized groups too often become complicit by allowing forgiveness to substitute for justice. We can’t keep helping to launder the reputations of serial perpetrators, or trying to reform the institutions that protect them.
We’ve been at this unholy experiment for centuries, which means we should know good and well by now that all the hatred and historical atrocities we’ve endured are not unfortunate misunderstandings that everyone is expected to move beyond. We have to break this obsessive ritual of reconciliation or we’re gonna keep participating in the very process through which oppression renews itself and leave the machinery of domination intact for the next generation.
What I love about El-Sayed’s victory speech is that it offers us a different model of political leadership. When he said quite plainly that “the bad guys lost,” he was showing us how to reject the familiar expectation that the targets of bigotry must immediately become ambassadors of reconciliation. He named the hate mongers instead of standing on that victory stage pretending that for 18 months he was having some kind of misunderstanding between equally aggrieved parties. He showed us that you can revel in your victories, that you ain’t got to soften your language, you can tell the truth, call out evil, and you don’t have to extend grace to the political opponents who tried to destroy him, and still want to btw.
“The bad guys lost.” That’s right Senator El-Sayed. You said that with your whole chest!
And come January 3, the Democrats need to remember those words not as a victory-night taunt to Donald Trump and the MAGATs, but as a mandate for accountability and purging the chambers of power of its cruel policies and people.
The Democrats need to bring El-Sayed’s energy and clarity to the work of come January. They need to investigate all the corruption and abuses, and restore protections. And they need to make damn sure that losing an election isn’t the only consequence for officials who violated the public trust. Because if they don’t, then “the bad guys” will have lost an election, but the machinery that empowered them will, once again, survive for another generation.
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