Sarah D is the vice chair for Prince George’s County branch of Metro DC DSA. A lifelong Marylander, when she’s not doing DSA work you can find her cooking, crafting, reading, or belly dancing.
SOMETHING HAS CHANGED in the United States since January 7, 2026. Between the violent attack on Venezuela and the murders of Renee Nicole Good, Alex Pretti, and Keith Porter, the public discussion quickly shifted from “we are in a hostile fascist takeover” to “we live in a fascist state.” In the DMV and across the country, large swaths of people are looking to take action against these horrors. Some will turn to ephemeral actions or rallies, others will dive head first into organizing with the Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America and other groups. This public swell of consciousness also means a revival of the well-meaning but misguided slogan, “this is not normal.” On the surface this slogan makes sense: what “normal” society would accept a state agency murdering people in the streets in cold blood? But in reality, violent escalations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are the inevitable consequence of Americans (primarily white, middle-upper-class Americans) ignoring decades of state-sanctioned violence against Black and brown people, stateside and abroad.
Realizing these escalations as inevitable does not mean we on the Left accept them and look away. Nor does it mean we smugly berate newly activated people. As organizers, one of our duties is to help this new crop of energized people connect our current situation to America’s insatiable appetite for violence in the US and abroad.
In the 20th century, philosopher Hannah Arendt coined a phrase that would become known as “the imperial boomerang,” which describes how European colonial tactics unleashed in the Global South were deployed in Europe against marginalized groups and dissidents throughout the continent in the 1930s and 1940s. Martinican author and thinker Aime Cesare had previously identified this phenomenon in World War II, where he said that “Hitler applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for [the colonies].”
We don’t have to go far back in history to see how much America, too, loves inflicting violence on its own population and beyond its borders — and the connections between these two imperial fronts. This extends past the Trump regime. During President Joe Biden’s administration, pro-Palestinian activists across the country had their college degrees withheld as others were tear-gassed for protesting the administration’s uncritical support for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. In 2023, Stop Cop City organizers in Atlanta faced baseless racketeering charges, which have since been dismissed, and one of the forest protectors, Tortugita, was murdered by law enforcement. In 2022, police killed a then record 1,176 people in the US, a number that has increased each year since — despite the 2020 uprisings and demands to defund the police. Under Biden, deportations hit a 10-year-high that had not been seen since the second Obama administration. Obama himself was referred to as the “deporter in chief” by immigrant rights activists, and both his and Biden’s administrations increased ICE funding on a yearly basis. On the international stage, Biden’s administration sacrificed its legacy to support Israel’s genocide during the latter half of his term, arguably costing Democrats the election in 2024. Obama’s legacy abroad will never escape the 563 confirmed drone strikes his administration conducted in countries including Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.
While many of our fellow leftists rightfully regard Democratic foreign policy with scorn, this perspective is far from mainstream. Too many well-meaning Americans still quip about the Obama administration’s “scandal-free tenure” and cite his tan suit as the greatest disaster of his term. If we are willing to overlook state-sanctioned violence against others to maintain our freedom and safety, then our freedom and safety are always going to be conditional. Trump and his cronies are not an aberration, and they never were. They are the manifestation of American exceptionalism and white supremacy.
Black content creator Ashtin Berry, known as The Collectress on social media, wrote a recent post that reads, “y’all aren’t mad enough because y’all haven't grieved enough. [...] Grief and anger are interdependent emotions. And they are two emotions that yt [sic] culture is purposely dismissive of. A people who does not grieve has no memory of what they have lost and therefore has no anger about how they risk to lose more. So when we say ‘y’all aren’t mad enough’ it is also a discussion about how you all have not grieved enough.”
Berry goes on to say that operating on fear alone is not sustainable. She calls fear an “easy emotion” and asks people to consider how fear and hope together can inform our actions, adding that anger alone is also insufficient if it isn’t “in alignment with how you love.” If we fail to connect our anger to grief and what we ultimately love, and if we don’t create spaces in the Left for folks to do the same, new potential organizers will get stuck in what coach and movement strategist Nikki Blak calls “white urgency.” White urgency demands you to “do something” to assuage your discomfort without addressing the systemic oppression that leads to injustice. It prioritizes quieting uncomfortable feelings over truly challenging power, and it’s what leads to things like auntie networks when abortion access is under attack, even though abortion funds have provided the same support in an organized manner for decades. It’s what led to Instagram users and companies posting black squares in “protest” of police violence in 2020, only for many posters to celebrate a “return to normal” once Biden, a passionate funder of the police, was inaugurated.
Grieving allows us to confront our discomfort head on and connect the dots between our present anger and the history of systemic oppression. These connections allow us to bring our anger in alignment with our love, as Berry writes. To my fellow privileged white folks who were radicalized during Trump’s first term (or before), it’s on us to help the public connect the current situation to the history of America’s violence against marginalized populations at home and abroad. This reckoning will bring up significant grief for newly activated folks and longtime organizers alike — grief for the innocent people taken or killed by ICE, and also for the idea of "normal" that has been lost. Grief resulting from the revelation that things have always been this way, that the current horrors are as American as baseball and apple pie.
Making room for this grief is a necessary step in building capacity to bring the change we need. Learning to grieve and to help others grieve in the face of these truths will also challenge the deeply embedded right to comfort, something that myself and my fellow privileged white folks have been socialized to protect since birth. We will need to practice new-to-us forms of emotional management and distress tolerance. Importantly, distress tolerance does not mean accepting abuse; rather, it asks us to recognize the differences between inconvenient situations and true moments of danger. Members of marginalized groups who have rung the alarm on these injustices for centuries have carried this work for far too long. Those of us who have benefited from oppression due to our privilege need to confront it directly — and reject it.
In her 2024 book From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, journalist Sarah Jaffe asks, “Can social movements then build spaces that hold [those] cycles of rest and celebrations of life? Commemoration of loss, spaces that are connected to the struggle but not the place where it happens? Can the movement hold the moments that are not work?” She continues, “A movement must, I think, be able to do all of the above, but to discern where and when each reaction is called for. Because those moments of grief are messy and often not a good place to begin strategizing; they are a car on fire, a necessary expression, a primal scream. They can bring great power, can inspire, but grief demands tending before it can be harnessed.”
Developing an organizational relationship with grief will not require us, as Metro DC DSA members, to table the important work the chapter is doing. Rather, DSA members should look at this as a necessary step to preserve the longevity of our membership and the resilience of our projects. It feels trite to propose a simple discussion group amidst turmoil, but as with many worthwhile endeavors, perhaps it is a necessary starting point. Black organizers have led the way in discussing the relationship between grief and organizing, and in certain communities tending to grief is rightfully identified as a tenet of community care; we socialists have a lot to learn from them. None of us know what is next, but if we’re truly going to get to the other side of this horror, we need to grieve what we lose in order to birth a better world. The best time to start was yesterday — the next best time is today.
