In an undated clip that recently surfaced on Twitter, poet Gil Scott-Heron explains his intentions behind the song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” “The first change that takes place is in your mind,” Scott-Heron said, at ease in casual conversation. “You have to change your mind before you change how you’re living and how you move. The thing that’s going to change people is something that no one will ever be able to capture on film.”
I started taking estrogen on November 10, 2018, my 24th birthday. Before then, I constantly struggled to feel alive in my own body; something always seemed to slip in between my surroundings and my lived emotional experience. Despite the myriad upheavals that came from graduating college and moving to Chicago, amongst many other shifts, my body never seemed up for the task of moving through these events with the vulnerability they necessitated. Trans author and biologist Julia Serano captured these frustrating experiences perfectly in her book Whipping Girl: “When testosterone was the predominant sex hormone in my body, it was as though a thick curtain were draped over my emotions. It deadened their intensity, made all my feelings pale and vague as if they were ghosts that would haunt me.”
As I’ve watched more white friends become activated in the last month, doing mutual-aid food distribution or helping other protesters with jail support, I’ve come to sense my transition within the larger disruptive spectrum that Davis describes, witnessing growing numbers of people recognize that bedrock assumptions defining collective reality are more contingent than previously imagined. None of these shifts are visible in my Instagram feed, clogged as it is with documentation of protest schedules and links to petitions. Instead, I sense movement in conversations. Unsurprisingly, COVID-19 has ruptured whatever lingering sense of social disconnection had been fed to us: before the outbreak, it was easier to ignore our interdependence with every other member of society, even as the virus forced us to physically separate from one another for months.
Still, however much the everyday surveillance of platform capitalism makes our present actions doubtful, tech companies cannot head off people’s frustrations indefinitely. No level of social-media- and quarantine-induced isolation can prevent the surprising movement that can remake the world in an instant, unpredictable even to those companies selling total predictability as a normative social good.
To dive back into intimate social contact in protest after months of separation is to feel the complicated emotional state of surprise. The immediate disruption of coronavirus, and the swift changes in attitude brought by recent protests, reminds us of the inherent unpredictability of the world, however much those in power would wish otherwise. Responding to the unexpected is one of life’s fundamental challenges, and while the ruling class has leveraged the shock of the pandemic towards their further enrichment, the unexpected resistance of so many gives me hope for outcomes once unimaginable.
