Waiting for US to sneeze

AS THEY say, when the US sneezes, the Caribbean gets a cold. This is not just because of its proximity, but because of its imperialist politics.

In other words, the US sees the Caribbean as its backyard and expects the region to conform to its foreign policy priorities and positions. If not, it will blockade as in Cuba, destabilise as in its support of a coup against Chavez in Venezuela, undermine democracy as it did in a potentially communist Guyana, misrepresent as it did in relation to the building of an international airport in Grenada and occupy as it did in Haiti.

Therefore, what happens in US politics affects the Caribbean even if we have our own sovereign contexts and concerns.

The candidacy of Kamala Harris, a mixed-race (what Trinidadians/Tobagonians call dougla) woman of Indian and Afro-Jamaican descent thus concerns us all.

Defeating Donald Trump, who embodies maniacal masculinity, would stem the surge of the white right in the US, a place where white supremacists march on the streets, where white men trash state buildings to protest legitimate election results and face virtually no social consequences and where black lives barely matter.

Harris as president would be historic for women of colour in the US, particularly for black women, who are at the bottom of a status hierarchy and its concentration of economic and political power. She’s not a cheat, sexist, sexual harasser, or xenophobe. She could be the dream of Shirley Chisholm, a Barbadian-descended black woman and state representative, finally fulfilled.

Yet we in the region need to maintain perspective and see the world from our Global South location and history. Will Harris reduce the billions of dollars being funnelled into Israel’s genocide of Palestinians? Based on her history and funding, she will likely not (be able to) make any policy change.

The Zionist lobby is very strong in the US – we saw this in the crackdowns in universities against students and faculty, in the denial of jobs and speaking opportunities to dissenters, and in the US’s continual blocking of UN Security Council resolutions.

People in the Caribbean are afraid to support Palestine publicly in case it means being denied a visa even to be in transit. Meta is pro-Zionism. Elon Musk is backing Trump.

Harris will have little room to manoeuvre if she either wants to be elected or achieve any goals while in office.

The world wants to see a dougla woman, with Global South and immigrant roots, intelligence, experience and a progressive track record win. It’s historic, necessary, and long overdue.

But what will be historic about a mixed-race woman funding Israel’s bombing of women and children in the occupied territories?

Asking these questions in solidarity with those critical of US (-funded) imperialism, including university students on the right side of history, is just as necessary.

In my home, there is much excitement about Harris, but as Prof Ruha Benjamin put it at a graduation speech in April this year, “Black faces in high places are not going to save us.”

This goes for brown faces and for women, who have both been more progressive than white men, despite having a harder time getting to the top and achieving while there, but who also become “conscripted into positions of power that maintain the oppressive status quo.”

How we evaluate leadership must always be by the extent to which it advances peace, empowerment, self-determination and justice in the lives of those most oppressed, and we should amplify those movements that fight to make even Global North women’s dominance accountable.

Harris will be better for reproductive rights, following in the path of Latin America, which is more left than the US and in which the Green Wave has secured safe and legal termination victories. When George Bush came to power, he reinstated a ban on funding health centres in the Global South that even provided information on abortion. This destroyed women’s access to reproductive healthcare across Africa, for example. So pro-choice politics are absolutely central to South-South solidarities.

Regarding other foreign policy positions, we wait and see. The US is escalating tensions in the Pacific Rim and the Russian border. Harris’s hawkish statements about the US having the strongest and most lethal fighting force mean billion-dollar profits for arms and reconstruction contractors, hence the endorsement of Republicans who should be considered war criminals, like Dick Cheney.

Will Harris back oil companies, deep-sea mining, and drilling in Alaska?

Inna dis backyard, such politics most certainly matter.

Diary of a mothering worker

motheringworker@gmail.com

Entry 540