“The belief that marginalized and hated populations can find freedom by being recognized by law, allowed to serve in the military, allowed to marry, and protected by anti-discrimination law and hate crime statutes is a central narrative of the United States [. . .] Social movements must abandon the widely held belief that oppressed people can be freed by legal recognition and inclusion if we are to truly address and transform the conditions of premature death facing impoverished and criminalized populations in this period.”
—Dean Spade1
“Black women saw themselves not as isolated within the United States but as part of a global movement of Black and Brown people united in struggle against the colonial, imperialist, and capitalist domination of the West, led by the United States. One can see the importance of international solidarity and identification especially today, when the United States so readily uses the abuse of women in other countries, such as Afghanistan, as a pretext for military intervention.”
—Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor2
The ruling class failed in its attempt to use the politics of inclusion in the 2016 elections to elect Hillary Clinton. However, this by no means reduces the significance of the “inclusion” narrative in the current political moment. Issues of inclusion and diversity have dominated political debates in Washington in place of questions about structural change. Neither the Democratic nor Republican Party even attempt to address structural oppression when it comes to U.S. imperialism. Universities and corporate media outlets responsible for reproducing the ideology of the ruling class rarely, if ever, discuss the root causes of poverty, war, racism, and patriarchy. To do so would raise questions about the privileged position that the politics of inclusion has occupied in American discourse and the violence that has come with it.
The politics of inclusion is not without context. It emerged in the neoliberal era of U.S. imperialism. Following the women’s movement, Black Freedom movement, and gay liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, developments in the American capitalist system rapidly changed. Important victories in these movements coincided with a downward turn in the U.S. capitalist economy. Worldwide competition between socialist and capitalist competitors led to the crisis of overproduction in 1973.
This crisis marked the beginning of a general downward trend in the world capitalist economy. The downward trend was fueled by the intense consolidation and speed-up of production. Technological advances simultaneously brought enormous short-term profits at the long-term cost of making overproduction a permanent fixture of the system. The waning influence of social movements of the Vietnam war-era came in a period where U.S. imperialism was gearing up to roll back social welfare in all forms and expand its war machine to protect hegemony in the face of economic decline. However, because of the movements of the mid-20th century, this could not be done in the old way.
It is no coincidence that narratives of inclusion have gained strength alongside the neoliberal assault on poor and working class people in the U.S., especially Black Americans. The ascendance of women, people of color, and LGBTQ communities into positions of imperial leadership is the product of reforms in American society. These reforms are dual in character. Social movements for Black liberation, women’s liberation, and sexual liberation forced the American nation-state to grant concessions in the realm of access (inclusion) but were unable to change the relations of power in society. The American imperial apparatus remained firmly in place, which inevitably led to the escalation of violence against oppressed groups under new, neoliberal circumstances.
The concept of inclusion has fit nicely into the neoliberal framework of individualism and meritocracy. Individual women such as Hillary Clinton have been heralded examples of the fruits of feminism. Former President Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 has been popularly described as a reflection of Martin Luther King’s “dream” of a more equal society. In other words, Clinton and Obama’s existence in high political office made the U.S. a more exceptional, perfect union. Meanwhile, as individuals such as Clinton and Obama made lucrative political careers as the faces of inclusion, millions of women and people of color fell into poverty, incarceration, displacement, and death in record numbers at the hands of the American neoliberal state.
What Lisa Lowe calls the violence of inclusion3 has been especially pronounced for the LGBTQ movement, especially for the transgender community. Trans people experience disproportionate rates of discrimination, joblessness, and criminalization because of their failure to accept their assigned gender at birth. The movement for the recognition of transgender issues has made significant gains in recent years, but not without cost. Neoliberal movements emphasizing access and inclusion have dominated the political discourse of the mainstream trans movement. The emphasis on visibility has often come at the expense of a sober analysis of the very institutions where access is being sought.
In the summer of 2017, for example, transgender inclusion in the military received mainstream attention after Donald Trump reversed an Obama Administration initiative to allow trans people to enlist. Outrage poured from Democrats and mainstream LGBTQ organizations accusing Trump of bigotry and discrimination against trans people. To be sure, it is worth condemning Trump’s assertion that the military could not afford the “extra” cost required to service their health care needs. However, outrage over Trump’s bigotry confined the issue in the narrow, neoliberal box of inclusion. As Eli Massey and Yasmin Nair explain in their article, “Inclusion in the Atrocious,” while CEO of GLAAD Sarah Kate Ellis was correct to condemn Trump for issuing a direct attack on trans people, she failed to account how the issue can’t simply be framed as a matter of “inclusion” versus “discrimination.” That’s because,
given the brutal history of United States military action, we also have to ask important questions about the meaning of participating in unjust institutions. Singling out the issue of inclusion without examining the institution itself produces morally incoherent stances. It can be akin to asking “Should women be allowed to serve in death squads?” or “Is the Mafia unfairly ethnocentric?” or “How can we racially diversify the board of Goldman Sachs?” In each instance, discussing the question requires one to accept the institution itself.4
Inclusion thus enhances public acceptance of oppressive, imperialist institutions, whether by facilitating silence about their crimes or prompting overt celebration of their democratic or humanitarian nature. Acceptance of the military is especially important to framing the U.S. as exceptional. The U.S. military is arguably the most dominant institution of U.S. imperialism. There are over 800 military bases spread across the world. The U.S. not only spends trillions of dollars on its war machinery5 but also regularly celebrates the military in a number of holidays. This makes American military power perhaps the most powerful signifier of American exceptionalism.
LGBTQ inclusion, especially the question of transgender participation in the military, has been wielded by the American ruling class to demonstrate the military’s exceptional character in the realm of human rights. Some of former President Barack Obama’s signature policies targeted the issue of LGBTQ inclusion. Obama set the precedent for the legalization of gay marriage, the eradication of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in the military, and the inclusion of trans people in its ranks. This led Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to declare that “gay rights are human rights” and President Obama to lecture Kenya and other African states in 2015 over their anti-gay discriminatory policies. Such imperial hubris, Dean Spade explains, “uses lesbian and gay rights to bolster the notion that the U.S. is the world’s policing arm, forcing democracy and equality globally on purportedly backward and cruel governments.”6 No mention is made of the U.S. military’s support of anti-LGBTQ and anti-Black mercenaries in Libya to overthrow the most prosperous African country in 2011. Nor does the narrative that the military brings forth LGBTQ inclusion say anything about the fact that American bombs and security forces prop up murderous regimes completely hostile to women and LGBTQ communities in Saudi Arabia, Honduras, and Ukraine.
A more relaxed policy of inclusion in the U.S. military has allowed the imperial apparatus to “pinkwash” its image as a means to justify its war aims. Pinkwashing is the act of marketing oppressive institutions as LGBTQ-friendly to distract from the exploitation and war inherent to them. As journalist Glenn Greenwald explains, the CIA and other intelligence apparatus regularly decry Russia and Iran’s anti-gay policies as reasons to promote regime change in those countries.7 Allegedly exclusionary policies toward LGBTQ people have been used as signifiers that reinforce a targeted nation’s backwardness and barbarity. For example, NGOs have clamored over the violation of human rights in Russia and Iran, two nations that the U.S. military has openly pursued war against. The American nation-state, and indeed the American military, is thus painted as a legitimate force of progress in the realm of LGBTQ liberation.
This exposes the violence inherent to the cause of inclusion. Big NGO and nonprofit organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign lead the way in the promotion of U.S. militarism as a noble path for transgender Americans. However, they have few solutions to the mass unemployment, homelessness, policing, and trauma that trans people face every day. One won’t find mainstream LGBTQ organizations, or what Dean Spade calls “Gay Inc.,” fighting the chronic withholding of health care from trans people inside of American prisons or the violence they face behind bars and in the ranks of the military. Instead, these organizations pinkwash the U.S. military by promoting trans inclusion in the military as the primary issue concerning trans people while at the same time casting their gaze abroad in service of U.S. imperialism’s war agenda.
Pinkwashing is also a popular policy of the Israeli government. Israel happens to be the United States’ closest military partner. Prominent intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky have called the Israeli government an apartheid state. Israeli-enforced apartheid is what prompted the formation of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The BDS movement views Israel’s military, political, and economic oppression of Palestine as a form of settler colonialism. Indeed, the reality of Israeli colonialism has come under a closer microscope for its expansion of illegal settlements that continue to displace Palestinians from their homes and its periodic wars on Gaza that have left thousands of Palestinians dead in the last decade alone. Israel’s long history of genocide and colonial plunder of the Palestinian people has thus given the proclaimed “Jewish State” several reasons to pinkwash its image as “LGBTQ” friendly.
The pinkwashing of Israel has emulated similar attempts by the U.S., minus the emphasis of inclusion in the military. NGOs and nonprofits such as StandWithUS have spent innumerable resources portraying Israel as the standard bearer of LGBTQ rights in the region. The influential StandWithUS organization labels Israel a “sanctuary for the LGBTQ community.”8 Dean Spade describes the broader context of StandWithUs:
For StandWithUs, pinkwashing—the practice of promoting Israel as “gay friendly” in an effort to divert attention from the brutal colonization of Palestine—is not new. For at least seven years, the organization has been putting on events aimed at portraying Israel as an LGBT-friendly country. StandWithUs did not come up with this strategy on its own. The Israeli government developed it as part of its “Brand Israel” campaign, launched more than a decade ago to help improve Israel’s public image. The Israeli Consulate, StandWithUs and other Israel advocacy groups fund international tours of LGBT activists from Israel aimed at promoting an image of Israel as progressive, diverse and inclusive.9
And like the pinkwashing of the U.S. military, Israel’s advocacy of LGBTQ rights both diverts attention away from Israel’s crimes and criminalizes the targeted “other.” StandWithUS and other Israel advocacy groups reinforce the settler colonial narrative of civilized and uncivilized. According to StandWithUS, Islamic extremism and other “cultural factors” promote intolerance toward LGBTQ communities across the Middle East. The organization accuses Palestinians of seeking to “harm gay members of their communities by accusing them of collaborating with Israel, a crime often punishable by death.”10
Yet while little, if any, evidence exists of these crimes, there is plenty of evidence of Israeli settler colonial crimes and its expansionist dreams. All one has to do is take a sober look at the history of Israel, study the Nakba, and read the Oded Yinon Plan of 1982 calling for the creation of a Greater Israel to confirm the colonial and imperialist character of Israel.11 Not only has Israel usurped Palestinian land, but it has also taken part in a number of wars against Syria, Egypt, and Iran. Israel uses billions in American military aid to pressure these countries into the chaos and instability necessary for the “Jewish State” to achieve its imperial dreams. The promotion of Israel as an LGBTQ–“friendly” partner to the American imperial apparatus thus gives cover to the criminal violence against the Palestinians and peoples of the region by shoring up the exceptionalist narrative Israel has imitated so well from its American partner.
Where exactly, then, does the violence of inclusion take the LGBTQ movement and movements for liberation generally? We know that questions of inclusion for trans people and the LGBTQ community in the apparatus of U.S. and Israeli militarism bring more war and oppression for the people of the world. Perhaps more important, however, is how a focus on inclusion normalizes the violence of U.S. imperialism by diverting movements into acceptable forms of protest. The legalization of gay marriage, for example, reinforced private property rights and ensured that poor members of the LGBTQ community would rely on receiving health care through marital relations rather than through a universal health care system. Trans inclusion in the U.S. military and hate crime legislation also use the oppressors’ tools to achieve liberation for the oppressed. Rather than focus on the question of economic and political powerlessness for the vast majority, inclusion focuses on legalistic methods of reform to “improve” the function of the imperial state for its oppressed subjects.
Social movements focused on legal reform assume that the U.S. imperial apparatus is designed to serve the most vulnerable sectors of society. The assumption is a staple of American exceptionalism and innocence. Rather than structural change, all that is needed are minor alterations to the state to make it more inclusive to LGBTQ communities and other oppressed groups. Alterations or tweaks to the U.S. imperial state, however, have left the social relations of exploitation, incarceration, and war unchanged. In many cases, they have exacerbated them. Take the passage of the Matthew Shepard, James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act in 2009. The bill was celebrated for adding “gender identity or expression” and “sexual orientation” to the federal hate crimes statute. At the same time, it was attached to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2010 (NDAA), which, according to Dean Spade
set aside the highest amount of money ever provided to the Department of Defense in U.S. history. The increase in funding to the Department was made to cover the expense of Obama’s 100,000-person troop surge in Afghanistan. Chandan Reddy has described the attachment of the hate crimes bill to the NDAA as “an act of genius” on the part of Congressional Democrats. Tying the federal LGBT hate crime legislation to a bill that raised military spending to its highest level in U.S. history brought Republican support needed to pass the hate crime law, since Republicans would favor the military expansion, and helped provide cover from attacks from the left on the military spending.12
Hate crime legislation was thus used as a political chip to sell war and ensure that the state-based “protection” of LGBTQ communities would lead to the further militarization of the American nation-state. Top down reforms, or reforms that are dictated by the American ruling class, reflect the interests of those at the top. War, policing, prison, and economic exploitation are the weapons used to achieve these interests. They are embedded in the very structure of the U.S. imperial state. That is why the political and economic well-being of LGBTQ communities is secondary to the priority of inclusion. The concept of inclusion can be manipulated into policies that serve the ruling class, while genuine demands for an end to poverty, homelessness, policing, and discrimination cannot.
Legal institutions in the U.S. are incapable of transforming the condition of LGBTQ communities, especially those communities that are poor, Black and Brown. Reform efforts such as the struggle for hate crime legislation or inclusion in the military completely ignore the structural causes for anti-LGBTQ bigotry and ignore the demands of grassroots organizations. Not only do they often come with the promise of more war abroad, but these reforms also expand the war apparatus on the domestic front. According to Spade, the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (PREA) is a perfect example of this phenomenon. PREA was ostensibly passed to address the rampant sexual abuse that occurs within U.S. prisons, especially for LGBTQ prisoners. However, the Act has been used to discipline those who defy gender norms. Prison authorities are less likely to believe LGBTQ prisoners who complain of sexual assault yet punish consensual sex to supposedly reduce the risk of rape inside of prisons. Furthermore, prisons also use PREA “as a reason to ban and punish gender-nonconforming behavior such as wearing a hairstyle considered too masculine for women prisoners or too feminine for male prisoners.”13
PREA is a quintessential example of why “their laws won’t save us.” It is “their” laws, the laws of the ruling class, which are designed to manage the exploitation of the oppressed. More LGBTQ prison guards, politicians, or military officers cannot change the reality that the American nation-state rests on a foundation of racism, patriarchy, and capitalism. Laws that imprison “hate” and reward a tiny few to the ranks of the oppressor class does not change the fact that the “people who violently destroy and end the most lives, are still on the outside—they are the people that run banks, governments, and courtrooms, and they are the people wearing police and military uniforms.”14 Inclusion offers an escape valve for those who wield power, but it doesn’t offer an escape from oppression. Rather, inclusion efforts make U.S. imperialism more effective in its oppression by pushing movements for social change toward goals that are acceptable, indeed desired, by the ruling class of the system.
The effectiveness of inclusion lies in the way it brands American exceptionalism and innocence in a fresh way. Inclusion has taken on a new level of importance in the 21st century as radical social movements have been replaced by the rapacious movement of U.S. imperialism. With nothing to offer increasing numbers of poor, oppressed, and struggling people, inclusion strengthens the illusory image that the U.S. is the most “democratic” and “free” society on the planet. The rise of Black and Latino politicians and celebrities or the passage of hate crime legislation creates the illusion that the U.S. is on a path toward progress. Whatever crimes the American nation-state commits at home and abroad are accepted as long as they are carried out by Black or queer representatives of the ruling class. “Diversity” and inclusion have thus become smokescreens that make it difficult for Americans to acknowledge that representation does not necessarily lead to a more just and equitable society for oppressed people. In fact, inclusion narratives have too often failed to accentuate the worsening conditions of Black people in America, even with their celebrations of “diversity” in political and corporate offices.
This does not mean that Trump’s right-wing attacks on women or LGBTQ people are acceptable or that bigotry should not be opposed at every turn. Defending oppressed people from attack is categorically different than pushing an agenda of inclusion at their expense. As Spade argues, it is time to look toward the grassroots for real solutions to the conditions before us. What is happening in the Black community in America? What is the state of trans people, especially trans people of color? Who is organizing to change these conditions and what do they seek? Are they seeking to make U.S. imperialism more inclusive or to dismantle it all together?
The narrators of American exceptionalism and innocence have made inclusion a central focus to ensure that these questions are never asked. Those who dare to ask are drowned out by well-funded efforts to diversify the American empire. A diversified empire, however, is still a dangerous empire. It is more dangerous now more than ever, with competing factions of the Trump camp and his opposition arguing over the most effective means to exploit and oppress the masses. Trump’s bigotry should not be tolerated, but neither should the violence that a more “inclusive” empire has wrought on the people and planet.