What does "Come Get Your People" mean?

I had to Google that question as I struggled to understand the NYT op-ed, "White Women, Come Get Your People," by Alexis Grenell. The phrase "come get your people" does not appear in the text of the column, only in the headline. There's a subheadline, "They will defend their privilege to the death." I guess "They" is the white women, not "your people." Is coming and getting your people another way to say defending your privilege?

We see photographs of Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, so I guess they're in the set of white women Grenell is addressing. Is Grenell white? It feels creepy to Google to check someone's race, but she made race relevant. The headline makes it seem as though she is not white, because why would you address a group as if they were other than you if they were not?

I've read the column already, and I found it strange and off-putting, so I'm going to read it again to examine my reaction and I'll also see if the meaning of the headline pops into clarity and, if not, examine what turned up in my Google search of the phrase "Come Get Your People."

It begins with melodrama and careless imagery:

After a confirmation process where women all but slit their wrists, letting their stories of sexual trauma run like rivers of blood through the Capitol, the Senate still voted to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. 

I say careless because "rivers of blood" is a lot of blood to flow out of "women" — which women? how many? — and yet they only "all but slit their wrists"? So what did they do in this metaphor, to produce all that blood, if they didn't open wrist veins?

With the exception of Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, all the women in the Republican conference caved, including Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who held out until the bitter end.

So Murkowski counts as one of the good ones (despite the pairing with Daines). And Susan Collins, despite her beautifully brilliant speech, is deemed to have fought against the position she forthrightly took. Then, she "caved." She gave in to the men.

These women are gender traitors, to borrow a term from the dystopian TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale.” They’ve made standing by the patriarchy a full-time job. 

That's awfully presumptuous. The vote on Kavanaugh wasn't — at least not necessarily — a vote for or against "the patriarchy." I think this kind of overstatement and hyperventilating is repellent to a lot of women and men. "Gender traitors" is very insulting and closed-minded about what different women might be thinking. Feminists should offer women freedom, not more limitation.

The women who support them show up at the Capitol wearing “Women for Kavanaugh” T-shirts, but also probably tell their daughters to put on less revealing clothes when they go out....

Less revealing than T-shirts stating political messages, or did Grenell just flip into visualizing these women policing the display of sexuality in their offspring?

These are the kind of women who think that being falsely accused of rape is almost as bad as being raped. 

But being falsely accused is horrible! We rarely get the choice which misfortune will befall us, but it's not right to brush aside some misfortunes because we think other misfortunes are worse. But anyway, compare the least bad rape to the worst false accusations, and you will surely see an overlap. I think there are some men — you? — who would rather be raped than to have his 2 young daughters believe, falsely, that he is a rapist. Again, life doesn't work like that. You don't get that choice. But I think just the one effect, your 2 daughters believe you are a rapist, might be as painful as an actual rape, and I'm not counting all the other potential effects that Kavanaugh was looking at: loss of the Supreme Court appointment, loss of his existing judgeship, loss of his ability to teach and to coach, loss of his wife, loss of his friends, and even loss of his liberty (as some were arguing that he should go to prison for perjury). These are not trifles! And it's counterproductive to pretend that they are for the purpose of convincing people that rape is a terrible crime.

The kind of women who agree with President Trump that “it’s a very scary time for young men in America,” which he said during a news conference on Tuesday.

But the people who scare me the most are the mothers, sisters and wives of those young men, because my stupid uterus still holds out some insane hope of solidarity.

She's reduced herself and others to an internal organ. Uteri cry out to other uteri: Sisters! But every young man is here because a woman was a mother, and the solidarity within a family is the strongest solidarity of all. That scares you? It scares you that mothers love their sons? The love of mothers toward their sons makes us want to see them free from false accusations AND want them not to be rapists. It's not one or the other. The 2 desires are mutually reinforcing. And it really is, as you say, stupid to think otherwise.

Since when do people on the left think fairness to the accused should be sacrificed in the interest of fighting crime? That's traditionally what lefties call a right-wing idea.

We’re talking about white women. 

Because black men are not susceptible to false accusations?! That's a ludicrously convenient assertion.

The same 53 percent who put their racial privilege ahead of their second-class gender status in 2016 by voting to uphold a system that values only their whiteness, just as they have for decades....

The effort to inject race into the Kavanaugh problem is embarrassing. We have enough racial problems without seeing them appropriated as a makeweight in an argument about women. And it's ridiculous and contemptuous toward women to say that when we vote we're just choosing whether to vote based on race or based on sex. Stop globbing us into big groups and ordering us what to do. It's not even effective persuasion, quite apart from its being plainly factually wrong and actively destructive.

I'm cutting a few sentences that lead up to this over-the-top statement:

So it seems that white women are expected to support the patriarchy by marrying within their racial group, reproducing whiteness and even minimizing violence against their own bodies....

I think by "minimizing violence against their own bodies" she means acting as if the violence against them isn't as bad as it really is, but the language is carelessly ambiguous in a way that doesn't serve her propagandistic agenda. The phrase could also mean doing things that lessen the extent of the violence. A woman who knows self-defense and keeps alert and aware of her surroundings is "minimizing violence." Perhaps Grenell is so focused on how women feel about what other people do to them that she didn't notice the double meaning that had to do with what women can do for themselves in this world. What's important is that the Democratic Party can endlessly offer to help women with their desperate, crying needs. And if you're a woman and you don't agree, you're a gender traitor.

Look at this logic:

During the 2016 presidential election, did white women really vote with their whiteness in mind? Lorrie Frasure-Yokley, a political scientist at U.C.L.A., recently measured the effect of racial identity on white women’s willingness to support Trump in 2016 and found a positive and statistically significant relationship. So white women who voted for him did so to prop up their whiteness....

A statistically significant relationship doesn't tell us what was in the voters' mind! White women voted for Trump to prop up their whiteness? How do you know they didn't vote because they hate abortion or because they wanted better trade deals or they don't trust the Clintons or, hell, maybe they still held out some insane hope of making America great again?

This blood pact between white men and white women is at issue in the November midterms. President Trump knows it, and at that Tuesday news conference, he signaled to white women to hold the line: “The people that have complained to me about it the most about what’s happening are women. Women are very angry,” he said. “I have men that don’t like it, but I have women that are incensed at what’s going on.”

I’m sure he does “have” them; game girls will defend their privilege to the death.

Grenell is insulting women again. Because they're not on her political side, she disparages them as having no mind at all. Hypocritically, she's saying about them what she's accusing Trump of saying about them, that they're conned and witless. But that isn't what Trump is saying. He might be thinking it, but Grenell is saying it.

But apparently that doesn’t include Ms. Murkowski anymore...

Meanwhile, Senator Collins subjected us to a slow funeral dirge about due process and some other nonsense... 

Due process is nonsense. 

... due process and some other nonsense I couldn’t even hear through my rage headache....

Grenell is presenting herself as a lunatic. She's doing that openly and intentionally. She's less aware, it seems, that she's also betraying the most treasured liberal values.

... as she announced on Friday she would vote to confirm Judge Kavanaugh. Her mostly male colleagues applauded her.

The question for white women in November is: Which one of these two women are you?

I fear we already know the answer.

So it ends. Awful. She should fear that her histrionics and stark illiberalism will drive voters, female and male, into voting against Democrats. I don't like rivers-of-blood melodrama and race jammed in anywhere you can think of anything to say about it and contempt for the intelligence and independence of women. What an awful opinion piece! And I still don't know what "come get your people" means!

Okay, I'll look at the stuff Google found for me. First, there's "Picking Up the Trash of White Supremacy," by Abby Norman in something called SheLoves:

Recently my friend Danielle has been tagging me in posts on Facebook about white people making unfortunate missteps, whether blatantly or accidentally, in the realm of racial reconciliation.

“Abby Norman, you better come get your people.”

At first I laughed. What do you mean my people? I do not know these people. They do not speak for me. Why do you think every dumb white girl is my people, what are you trying to say?

What Danielle was trying to say was that as a white woman, with white privilege, it is my responsibility to educate other white people so everyone can live in a better world. Too often white women, and specifically I, have depended on black women to educate white communities about their lived experiences....

White Ladies, the white community is our space and our responsibility....

Second, there's a tweet from Brittney Cooper (AKA ProfessorCrunk) that says:

White feminists, when we say come get your people, we mean come get your girl, #PermitPatty, out here harassing little Black girls. This kind of thing makes me feel the opposite of non-violent.

So there's this specifically racial meaning, it seems, that comes from black people who are tired of getting stuck fighting racism on their own and want white people to see it and to take the lead disciplining other white people. But Grenell isn't black, and though she tries, she's not really talking about race. She's a white woman demanding that other white women discipline white women, and not about race but about getting tripped up in the nonsense of due process rather than just automatically and uncritically believing a woman's accusations.

If it's some specifically black slang, why not let black people have it? Speaking of white privilege. Do you think everything is yours?

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SNL's "Lindsey Graham" says: "Let's keep this horny male energy going 'til the midterms!"

The cold open shows GOP Senators celebrating their Kavanaugh victory in sports-locker-room style and "Chuck Schumer" weakly whining over the Democrats defeat and then getting punched in the balls by "Joe Manchin":





You can watch the whole sketch if you scroll back to the beginning, but I'm setting it to start at the depiction of Susan Collins, who, of course, can't be shown as a strong, principled woman who gave the best speech anyone can remember a Senator giving. No, she's a witless patsy, just vaguely realizing she's been had:



If it were funnier, I'd make a new tag, Kavanomedy. But it isn't funny. The main idea is that the American people were overwhelmingly opposed to Kavanaugh and are ferociously angry now and will let the clueless Senators feel their wrath in the midterm elections. If the Kavanaugh-haters who watch the show could really believe that, maybe they'd laugh, but there's no evidence that's what's happening out there in the real world. Oh, what am I saying? Who needs evidence?! Live within the fantasy for as long as you can, and "SNL" wants to be inside your bubble. Not much comic potential there, but who cares? It's the Era of That's Not Funny.

IN THE COMMENTS: gilbar — quoting my "SNL" wants to be inside your bubble — links to the "SNL" sketch that acknowledged the bubble within which it pictures its audience:

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"The crowd in front of the U.S. Supreme Court is tiny, looks like about 200 people (& most are onlookers)..."

"... that wouldn’t even fill the first couple of rows of our Kansas Rally, or any of our Rallies for that matter! The Fake News Media tries to make it look sooo big, & it’s not!"

Trump tweets.

Also at Twitter, I'm seeing Jordan Peterson promoting (but not necessarily endorsing) the idea that Kavanaugh, confirmed, should step down. Responding to him is Scott Adams, who says, "This feels like a terrible idea to me, but because smart people are saying it, I’m open to hearing the argument."

Peterson replies: "I'm not certain that is the right move. It's very complex. But he would have his name cleared, and a figure who might be less divisive might be put forward."

And Adams says, "Quitting would clear his name? I'm not connecting any of these dots."

I agree with Adams and would add that a "less divisive" figure is a fantasy. If the Democrats dream of stopping Kavanaugh were to come true, they would be fired up to use any means necessary to stop the new nominee. I'm reminded of this passage in the Susan Collins speech:

The President nominated Brett Kavanaugh on July 9th. Within moments of that announcement, special interest groups raced to be the first to oppose him, including one organization that didn’t even bother to fill in the Judge’s name on its pre-written press release – they simply wrote that they opposed “Donald Trump’s nomination of XX to the Supreme Court of the United States.” A number of Senators joined the race to announce their opposition, but they were beaten to the punch by one of our colleagues who actually announced opposition before the nominee’s identity was even known.

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"Our Supreme Court confirmation process has been in steady decline for more than thirty years. One can only hope that the Kavanaugh nomination is where the process has finally hit rock bottom."

From the Susan Collins speech in the Senate yesterday.

I read that and thought, no, this is not rock bottom. There's more ahead, lower places to sink. Why wouldn't there be? Maybe the 2018 elections will punish the Democratic Party for what it did with the Kavanaugh nomination, and everyone will realize they'd better never do anything like that again. But to say that is to say, there is a lower depth, and they've got to get there before they'll see they've got to enter recovery.

Notice the connection between "rock bottom" and "hope": "One can only hope... the process has finally hit rock bottom." "Rock bottom" means more than just: at least we can't sink any lower. It means a confrontation with reality that shocks you into changing your ways.

On this notion of "hitting rock bottom" — no, don't go to Urban Dictionary! — I found an article (in NY Magazine) by Jesse Singal, "The Tragic, Pseudoscientific Practice of Forcing Addicts to 'Hit Rock Bottom'":

One of the many impressive things about Maia Szalavitz’s new book Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction, is how effectively she debunks various myths about addiction and how to treat it. In fact, the book’s main argument is that many people are misreading what addiction is altogether: It should be seen not as a disease or a moral or personality shortcoming, but rather a learning disorder. “Addiction doesn’t just happen to people because they come across a particular chemical and begin taking it regularly,” she writes early on. Rather, “[i]t is learned and has a history rooted in their individual, social, and cultural developments.”

Or, as Szalavitz put it to the Daily Beast: “If you don’t learn that a drug helps you cope or make you feel good, you wouldn’t know what to crave. People fall in love with a substance or an activity, like gambling. Falling in love doesn’t harm your brain, but it does produce a unique type of learning that causes craving, alters choices and is really hard to forget.”...

As Szalavitz explains, the idea comes from “one of [Alcoholics Anonymous’s] foundational texts, 12 Steps and 12 Traditions.” She pulls this excerpt:

Why all this insistence that every A.A. must hit bottom first? The answer is that few people will sincerely try to practice the A.A. program unless they have hit bottom. For practicing A.A.’s, the remaining eleven Steps means the adoption of attitudes and actions that almost no alcoholic who is still drinking can dream of taking. Who wishes to be rigorously honest and tolerant? Who wants to confess his faults to another and make restitution for harm done? Who cares anything for a Higher Power, let alone meditation and prayer? Who wants to sacrifice time and energy in trying to carry A.A.’s message to the next sufferer? No, the average alcoholic, self centered in the extreme, doesn’t care for this prospect—unless he has to do these things in order to stay alive himself.

Under the lash of alcoholism, we are driven to A.A. and there we discover the fatal nature of our situation.

Since the first of the 12 steps an A.A. member must work through is to admit to “admit their powerlessness” over their addiction, it makes sense that the program would embrace a device like “rock bottom.” It’s only when your alcoholism (or other addiction) has gotten so bad you’ve been kicked out of your house by your spouse, have alienated all your friends, and are down to the last $50 in your checking account, that you’ll finally be able to realize just how far you’ve fallen — or something. Fully buying into the program requires desperation, in other words, and to “help” addicts get to that desperate point is to help them recover: “From this perspective,” writes Szalavitz, “the more punitively addicts are treated, the more likely they will be to recover; the lower they are made to fall, the more likely they will be to wake up and quit.”

Szalavitz explains that this is a totally pseudoscientific concept.... For decades, Szalavitz writes, programs like Phoenix House and Daytop used “sleep deprivation, food deprivation, isolation, attack therapy, sexual humiliation like dressing people in drag or in diapers, and other abusive tactics in an attempt to get addicts to realize they’d ‘hit bottom’ and must surrender.”...

[W]hen it comes to “hitting bottom” and so many of the other pseudoscientific approaches to fighting addiction, the actual goal — or part of it, at least — has always been to marginalize the addict, to set them apart and humiliate them. There’s a deep impulse to draw a clear, bold line between us, the healthy people, and them, the addicts. What clearer way to emphasize that divide than to cast them down into a rock-bottom pit, away from the rest of us?

American politics is shot through with us/them rhetoric and emotion right now. I don't know the way out, other than to resist it myself, as I continue my daily scribblings here. I like hope as much as the next person, but I don't think hitting rock bottom is the beginning of a path of recovery, and if I did, I'd need to believe that the Senate can't go any lower, and I don't think the musings of Susan Collins are going to turn anyone back.

It was a great speech, but why did we hear this from her so late in the process she purports to decry? Why is she only willing or capable of saying these things when she's looking back on the wreckage?

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"The Me Too movement is real. It matters. It is needed, and it is long overdue... I found [Ford's] testimony to be sincere, painful and compelling.

"I believe that she is a survivor of a sexual assault and that this trauma has upended her life. Nevertheless, the four witnesses she named could not corroborate any of the events," said Senator Susan Collins, explaining her vote for Brett Kavanaugh. "We will be ill-served in the long run if we abandon the presumption of innocence."

Reported in "Collins and Manchin Will Vote for Kavanaugh, Ensuring His Confirmation" (NYT).

Here's a comment over there (with over 1,000 up votes):

Thank you Heidi Heitkamp, and thank you Lisa Murkowski for standing up for women and against sexual predators. And how about you Susan Collins? Do you want to be the only woman in the Senate to put a man creditably accused of sexual assault against multiple women who has clearly demonstrated his intent in the very recent Jane Doe case to eviscerate, if not overturn, Roe v. Wade? It's time to stand with your sisters and vote "No!" to white male power and privilege to avoid responsibility for sexual misconduct by blaming and mocking the women.

ADDED: Here's the Susan Collins speech:



Full text (NYT):

Informed by Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist 76, I have interpreted [the Senate's advise-and-consent role] to mean that the President has broad discretion to consider a nominee’s philosophy, whereas my duty as a Senator is to focus on the nominee’s qualifications as long as that nominee’s philosophy is within the mainstream of judicial thought....

Some argue that because this is a lifetime appointment to our highest court, the public interest requires that doubts be resolved against the nominee. Others see the public interest as embodied in our long-established tradition of affording to those accused of misconduct a presumption of innocence. In cases in which the facts are unclear, they would argue that the question should be resolved in favor of the nominee.

Mr. President, I understand both viewpoints. This debate is complicated further by the fact that the Senate confirmation process is not a trial. But certain fundamental legal principles—about due process, the presumption of innocence, and fairness—do bear on my thinking, and I cannot abandon them.

In evaluating any given claim of misconduct, we will be ill served in the long run if we abandon the presumption of innocence and fairness, tempting though it may be. We must always remember that it is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy.

The presumption of innocence is relevant to the advice and consent function when an accusation departs from a nominee’s otherwise exemplary record. I worry that departing from this presumption could lead to a lack of public faith in the judiciary and would be hugely damaging to the confirmation process moving forward.

ADDED: I'm only quoting a portion of Collins's speech, which is quite substantial. Here is a much shorter speech from Senator Lisa Murkowski, the one Republican who is voting no:

This hasn’t been fair to the judge, but I also recognize that we need to have institutions that are viewed as fair and if people who are victims, people who feel that there is no fairness in our system of government, particularly in our courts, then you’ve gone down a path that is not good and right for this country. And so I have been wrestling with whether or not this was about qualifications of a good man or is this bigger than the nomination.

And I believe we’re dealing with issues right now that are bigger than the nominee and how we ensure fairness and how our legislative and judicial branch can continue to be respected. This is what I have been wrestling with, and so I made the — took the very difficult vote that I did.

I believe Brett Kavanaugh’s a good man. It just may be that in my view he’s not the right man for the court at this time. So I have taken my vote here this morning, I’m going to go back to my office and write a floor statement that is more fulsome and have the opportunity to have that.

But this has truly been the most difficult evaluation of a decision that I have ever had to make, and I’ve made some interesting ones in my career. But I value and respect where my colleagues have come down from in their support for the judge, and I think we’re at a place where we need to begin thinking about the credibility and integrity of our institutions.

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