Solidarity In An Emergency

Žižek on Class Struggle and the Refugees at Our Door.

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By Saul Myers

 

1. Who is allowed into our country, who is not? Who is here illegally, who will be deported? Who belongs here, is one of us, and who is secretly planning a mass shooting or learning to fly a plane but not how to land one? Having escaped death and torture in war-lacerated lands, some will make it to a safe port; others will drown or die of heatstroke en route. Of those who make it to the ramparts of Europe, some will wait, as the portcullises clang shut, with legions of others in makeshift refugee camps. A certain classification of persons will be granted asylum in our country; another class of humanity will keep washing, without proper documents, the dishes in our restaurants, and care for our young. Whom shall we give the chance to earn a living and what class of persons will be denied? Who exactly are our own? Does that include those in dying towns who now look resentfully across boarded-up factories at more prosperous neighbors, and say: ‘We will become Great Again by strict enforcement of borders—Great Again, by walling ourselves in!’?

Read the rest of this
feature in the print issue

Issue 1
Publication Date: May 17

Saul Myers (Ph.D., Humanities Center, Johns Hopkins University) teaches courses in philosophy, literature, and intellectual history at the Maryland Institute College of Art.