The Woke Grift, Part Four

Zombies and ressentiment

“You’re being transphobic!” she shouted, and then slammed the door.

I sighed, and made myself a cup of tea. Then, I called our landlord.

“Hey—” I said, trying to sound as submissive as I could. “I can cover the missing rent, no problem. Sorry that this happened again.”

“It’s the third month in a row. This can’t happen again. It won’t be hard to find new tenants...”

I cringed. “Sorry, really. We’ll fix it.”

‘It’ was the third bounced check by our new roommate, who’d moved in four months before into the smallest room of our rented Seattle house. That room had once been my room, a decade before, the first stable roof over my head after several months of being homeless. I’d found that room because I’d crashed on the living room floor in that house several nights. One day they told me there was an open room. I rented it, and then I was “in.”

She, our new roommate, the one whose rent checks kept bouncing, had gotten the room a little easier than I had. She’d answered the Craigslist advert (“tiny room in a queer punk co-op house, 200/month, no pets, smoking okay, view of mountains and Lake Washington”). We invited her over for tea, and then she moved in the next week.

For the first month things were fine. She’d not told us about the sex work before, but I’d done enough of it myself while homeless to understand. “Just let us know when a guy’s coming over so we’re not surprised,” I had asked.

“That’s an invasion of my privacy,” she spat back.

“Oh, sorry,” I had replied. “You’re right, sorry.”

That felt a little weird, but we went with it. She was trans (and reminded us of this often, especially when we asked her to please wash her dishes), and we were all queer and were committed to social justice, so of course we didn’t want to violate her privacy.

But the rent thing was getting a bit irritating. We all wrote our own checks to the landlord, and hers was returned for insufficient funds. The landlord called us, asked what was up. I said I didn’t know but would find out.

“Hey, the landlord said your check bounced.”

“Not possible. There’s enough money in my account.”

I really hadn’t known what to say. “Uh, could you call him and tell him that?”

“I’m busy,” she’d said, then slammed her door.

I covered her rent that first month. It was only $200, which was only two overtime shifts at the restaurant where I worked. So it was no big deal.

No big deal, except that it happened the next month, too. She slammed the door on me again when I told her, and then shouted at me when I said I couldn’t afford to cover her rent that month.

“I’ll have to find more tricks,” she’d spat back. “The last one tried to choke me and you guys didn’t come help.”

I was genuinely mortified. “Oh my god I didn’t know.”

“No one cares about trans people,” she’d said, looking hurt.

“Look. I can cover it again. But I can’t next month. And this would be easier if you let me know ahead of time that you need help.”

It was the next month that she called me a transphobe because I wouldn’t pay her rent a third time. The more I tried to explain that I wasn’t, that this wasn’t about her being trans but about her not paying the rent, the more proof I seemed to be offering her that I actually hated trans people.

Something changed in my head during that conversation, though. The way she said something, something I don’t remember, felt uncomfortably familiar. It felt less like a memory and more like an echo. As she berated me from the other side of a closed door, I suddenly understood what she was doing...because I had done it, too.

When I first came out as gay, along with the relief of no longer needing to hide “who I was” came a really useful and utterly invisible pass for some really shitty behavior. I could shut down arguments with friends or coworkers really quickly by reminding them they were straight, that the whole world was built around them, and that they would never understand how hard it was to be gay.

Whether they were asking me to pay back the ten dollars I owed them from dinner a few weeks before, or to replace the CD they’d lent me that I scratched beyond use, or just asking me to not be such an asshole sometimes, my gayness became a trump card that could end any conversation.

It took me several years to notice that it also ended friendships. And of course it only really worked on friends, or on people sympathetic to me. I tried reminding a boss about my sexuality when I’d showed up late one too many times, and that got me nowhere. It also didn’t work with bill collectors, nor with the bouncer who threw me out of a bar for being too drunk, or really anyone else with power.

In fact, it only worked on people who liked me, on people who really wanted to be “good” or “sensitive” and didn’t want to hurt anyone. And that felt awful, because I was bullying people who just wanted to be nice, just like I realized in that moment my roommate was doing to me.

“You need to find another place,” I suddenly said, surprising myself. “I can’t pay your rent again.”

“You can’t make me leave!” she replied, swinging the door open. “This is discrimination.”

I shook my head. “No. This is me choosing not to pay your rent for you.”

She eventually moved out, though not without a few fruitless phone calls to trans rights groups and the city’s tenants’ union, as well as some rather awful social media posts. And though I was glad to find a new roommate who would actually pay rent on time to replace her, I did still feel rather awful about it for awhile.

I guess that is inevitable, though. I imagine the former friends who finally stood up to my own bullying of them probably felt a tinge of regret as well. Perhaps it all could have gone better between them and I, or between her and I. And I wonder if for them they had lingering doubts long after, just as I did after asking that roommate to leave.

“Am I homophobic and don’t realize it?” perhaps they asked, just as I sometimes asked, “do I unconsciously hate trans people?”

All I really know is that this was no way to keep friendships, nor relationships. And it didn’t actually stop homophobia, or transphobia, or any oppression or injustice. For me as for her, my identity became a weapon not against people who wielded actual power over my life (landlords, bosses—you know, capitalists) but a crude bludgeon to manipulate people not much better off than myself.

In almost two decades of being in “radical” spaces I’ve seen this pattern repeated like a sick joke. During Occupy, for example, a general assembly ground to a halt because of a speaker decrying the crowd’s refusal to acknowledge how traumatic and oppressed her life as a trans black woman had been.¹ In an anarchist commune, I watched mutely as two members berated a third for his request that they replace food of his that they’d eaten. He wasn’t BIPOC like they were, he was a “settler-colonist,” so how dare he ask that?

Of course the internet makes this behavior even easier. There are entire online forums devoted to it, like “Anarcho-Communism: Radical Communal Learning Space,” where people post their Venmo and Cashapp links to findom “yt” members into paying indulgences in the form of reparations and “mutual aid.” In such forums, you can absolve yourself of your sinful white-skin privilege by paying someone’s cell phone bill, or funding their breast removal surgery, or buying things for them off their Amazon “wish-lists.”

Of course, if you are not part of one of those forums, you can use your own social media accounts to sell these indulgences, as occurred over 90,000 times on Twitter alone since the beginning of the year.² Of course, it isn’t just reparations, but also emotional labor that needs to be paid. Don’t worry, though: there are handy guides for figuring out how to compensate social media “emotional laborers,” or they’ll generate an invoice for you. ³

This lumpenproletarian grift all in the name of “justice” and “reparations” was probably inevitable in the absence of an actual organized left in the United States. Without an organized left, concepts such as mutual aid, emotional labor, reparations, structural injustice, and redistribution of wealth become untethered from anything that might actually change material conditions. Once vibrant and powerful ideas and now mere shambling zombies, these concepts cannibalize the lower classes, ensuring any nascent class consciousness dies before it is born.

Especially in the relentless social media requests for “mutual aid” and “reparations” we see an obvious question never asked. Individual after individual begging (and sometimes coercing) “allies” for help paying rent, for groceries, for medical procedures, for baby formula—perhaps something could be done collectively to make those things more available? Maybe instead of the lower classes redistributing their non-existent wealth to those with even less, they could all figure out a way to force those with exponentially greater amounts to redistribute some of theirs instead?

The most this false form of “mutual aid” accomplishes is making sure landlords, cell phone companies, private utility companies, doctors, chain retailers, and restaurants can keep turning a profit on their capital while we get to survive another month. And just like government stimulus checks, such redistribution acts as mere opiate, treating the pain without ever healing the wound.

Worse, the use of these zombified leftist concepts to morally extort/exhort people barely better off into giving money does nothing to build any kind of “intersectional” solidarity against the capitalists. Instead of collective action against landlords, business owners, and the government to reduce rents, pay better wages, and make health care universal, the struggle in the United States has devolved into a war against the slightly better off of the people the capitalists exploit. The white cis-abled-heterosexual-male worker especially becomes the target of all our trauma and the cause of all our oppression. We treat him as if he is our dead-beat dad, constantly refusing to take responsibility for children whom he correctly suspects he never fathered.

It doesn’t stop with him, though. His counterpart, the white cis able-bodied heterosexual woman likewise stands in the way of our collective liberation, sometimes more and sometimes less than the white abled-bodied cis gay male. He, in turn, may or may not be more oppressive than the white able-bodied cis lesbian woman, depending on whether or not that lesbian includes trans women in their dating pool. But of course they all oppress the Black able-bodied heterosexual cis male (except that one of them became US president before any white cis able-bodied heterosexual woman did).

Descend (or are we ascending here?) the hierarchy of oppression and we see that the white trans woman oppresses sometimes more and sometimes less than the Black cis disabled-bodied lesbian, who, if she does not have sufficient melanin, may actually have more privilege than a Black heterosexual cis woman with an invisible disability and less light-skin privilege, not to mention how much more privilege they all have over the asexuals and agendered among us.

I think we’ve had enough years of this kind of discourse to realize that none of this changes material conditions for anyone. Worse, now that the much-hyped existential threat of Donald Trump no longer looms as a unifying enemy⁴, there is nothing to cohere the oppressed throngs together except their mutual distrust of each other.

What could exist instead feels almost profane to imagine, but let’s imagine it anyway. What if we created an organized movement centered not on esoteric oppression categories but practical questions like “how will people eat?” and “why are all these investment properties empty while people sleep in the streets?” Such a movement might also ask other dangerous questions too, like “how can we make it so people don’t have to beg money for groceries, or utility bills, or medical treatment?”

Such a movement wouldn’t work, of course, because it would have to be composed of a lot of people, and some of those people would be male or white or cis or heterosexual or able-bodied—that is, “oppressive” people. And those oppressive people might want to focus on fighting the capitalists instead of dealing with someone’s unresolved personal trauma. They might not want to pay someone’s rent a third month in a row, and they might even ask that someone replace the CD they scratched. They might not always remember everyone’s pronouns, or that you have a self-diagnosed “invisible disability,” or that their own skin color should determine whether they are allowed to say “basic” or call someone “sis.”

Worst of all, they might make awful statements like “maybe it’s not oppressive that I asked you to pay me back the money I lent you,” or, worst of all, “hey—maybe you need therapy.”

I did, by the way. And it turned out that being gay wasn’t the reason my friendships were in shambles and I never seemed to have enough money to pay people back. I’m also pretty sure that being trans wasn’t why that former roommate had to move out after three months of unpaid rent, or why the same thing happened to her again in her next living situation.

In my case, I was just being an awful person wallowing in the self-righteousness of ressentiment, wearing my identity like a shield to ward off every justified criticism of my behavior. That was all much easier than looking at the material conditions of my life and trying to make those better.

I suspect for her, as for many others, and especially for the “woke” shambling around in the zombified corpses of leftist ideas, this is why they do it, too.

1. I was one of the people who tried to help this person afterwards. I still receive occasional “reparations" requests from them via social media.

2. “…There have been more than 91,000 tweets which mention “cashapp reparations,” “venmo reparations,” or “venmo cashapp reparations,” according to an Axios analysis of data from Keyhole, since the start of the year.” link here.

3. There are now online tools you can use to create your own invoice. “The Patriarchy” owes me $108,000 a year, but since I’m male apparently I’m supposed to send the bill to myself.

4. I’ll cover this in an upcoming essay, as Trump’s presidency was the final coup needed for the woke urban elite to kill off what remained of the traditional left.