Originally written and published for Issue 002 of The Owl by the Milwaukee Turners
Whenever I hear the news of another tragedy—another death at the hands of police, another mass shooting—the emotions hit me, in the words of author John Green, “the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.” I figure it’s a sort of defense mechanism: my brain processing the news coldly, detachedly, maybe not quite understanding at first the gravity of the news, allowing the facts to settle in before my heart catches up and I’m too flooded with emotion to process anything else.
I can’t even begin to think of past examples anymore; there are too many. You can throw a dart at a calendar and odds are, you’ll find an American tragedy on that date.
The latest? The mass shooting in Atlanta. The murder of eight people, six of whom were Asian women, at the hands of another angry white man.
The tragedies manifest differently for all of our communities, but the root is the same: white supremacy.
The United States was built on white supremacy, and through its existence, communities of all backgrounds have suffered. There are more experienced historians who can tell you about it all better than I can, but to rattle off just a few examples: the enslavement of Africans and African-Americans. The genocide and forced relocation of Native Americans. The Chinese Exclusion Act. The internment of Japanese-Americans. The Muslim travel ban. Family separations at the Mexican border. Mass incarceration. So on. So on. So on.
When I think of white supremacy, I see it as the mythological Hydra of Lerna. For all the blows we deal it, it sprouts more heads, more ways to terrorize any and every community it desires with equal fury. With its poison breath, it creates more minions, whispering, “They’ll take your jobs. They’ll infect you with viruses. They’ll harm your children. Help me stop them.“
And with that same poison breath, it pits communities of color against each other. White supremacy harms all of us, and the Hydra of white supremacy knows it has to keep us divided so we can’t fight back. It can be easy, in our grief, to point fingers at each other instead: “Where were you when I needed you?” “How can you cry out for help when I need help too?” Even our white allies begin to fade—the exhaustion of, “Haven’t I done enough?” creeps in, and suddenly, no one is fighting the Hydra anymore.
I hear about the tragedy in Atlanta the morning after, March 17. I go through the same internal process: a cool-headed reading of the articles filling up my social media feeds, followed by the immense heaviness that comes after. The first thing I do, before I even get out of bed, is send an email to my career coach, who I’m supposed to meet with later that day. She’s Filipina, and I know the pain of anti-Asian violence has harmed her before. I offer her the opportunity to reschedule our appointment; I tell her outright, “after the El Paso shooting a few years ago, all I wanted to do was hide under a blanket for a while, so I imagine you might be feeling the same.”
She accepts.
It’s the kind of solidarity one finds themselves forging across cultural divides, the kind of bonding that forms out of shared trauma. Tragedy strikes, and while one of us grieves, the others reach out to support them, to carry as much weight as we can for them, remembering the times that we, too, have grieved before.
Among my friends and colleagues of color, I think we know, without saying it out loud, that we have this agreement in place. A Black man is executed by the police? Rest, my friend; I’ll carry the torch for you. An Asian elder is assaulted in the street? Rest; I’ll take up your load. A migrant child dies in custody at the border? I don’t need to ask; the support I’ve shared always comes back. We all know these pains too well, and we know too well how to shift the constant weight among each other so that we all might survive another day. We know that we cannot carry this burden alone.
In most versions of the myth, Heracles doesn’t defeat the Hydra alone. Realizing that he can’t keep up with all the newly-sprouted heads, he calls upon his nephew Iolaus for support. Heracles, using a sword from the goddess Athena, cuts the heads, and Iolaus cauterizes the wounds with a firebrand so they can’t grow back.
The only way the Hydra of white supremacy falls is through our unity. And no, not the vision of unity in which we all sing campfire songs and join hands with the Hydra, but the unity in which we, the afflicted and the allies, become the sword and the firebrand that finally stops hate.
I believe there’s a future where the racist institutions finally crumble. I believe there’s a future where our leaders no longer stoke fear and turn misguided people into lethal weapons. I believe there’s a future where we see each other not as reductive stereotypes or by the worth of the fruits of our labor, but where we recognize the fullest humanity in one another.
This is the time to recognize that we are closer than we think. Police brutality, family separations and deportations, and racialized violence transcend cultural divides, and they are all joined together by the fact that white supremacy continues to blaze and destroy everything in its path. We need to protect and stand for each other. Violence against one is violence against all.
Together, we are stronger than the Hydra. We are stronger than hate.