Tarot’s The World & Kamala Harris
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image: a photo of Kamala Harris imaged by Lawrence Jackson (public domain via wikimedia commons). she’s wearing pearl earrings and a pearl necklace, a blue shirt, eyeliner, and nude lipstick. she has a crisp silk press. The background is aquatic blue with a grainy quality.
There's something unseemly about anyone, especially a Black person, wanting to be president.
I hesitate to express that belief, because it's often leveraged for white supremacist ends. I’m certainly not implying that Black people are incapable of the presidency. I believe, and have seen, that we are more than able to hold that vaunted, dastardly post.
I don't understand why, with our history in this country, anyone among us would want to sit at its helm.
The commander of chief of the American armed forces. Holder of the button that could end the world.
There’s a fantasy that when a person from an oppressed group becomes president, it improves the presidency.
Obama proved it was only that: a fantasy.
Why after Tulsa, after Osage Avenue, after Tuskegee, and Rosewood, and everything else, would anyone among us want to be the one to send the bombs?
But to ask that question is to forget that not all of us are among us. That some of us have agendas that include megalomania.
What's good for one person may be bad for many. Kamala Harris' run has been a win for Howard University alum, AKAs, and beauticians specializing in a firm silk press. It's the culmination of a long and complex road for Kamala Harris.
Her assent has required great strategic strength, and a complete abandonment of most Black people on earth.
This is yet another manifestation and permutation of tarot's The World.
Tarot's World card bring us success, true success, far more lasting than the wins of The Chariot.
Yet they never feel as sweet as The Chariot in the moment, because The World requires you to keep your head down a long time.
These are the achievements of a lifetime, the things that many only come to with age. Weddings. Anniversaries. Retirement dinners and grandchildren that go off to college.
Yet there's also the connotation of Power, with a capital "p." Saturn's hand is heavy on tarot's World card. It says "you gotta do what you gotta do."
In any situation that lives under that motto, someone else is invariably hurt.
"For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, but lose his soul?" That's what famous Palestinian, Jesus Christ asked his disciples.
He's telling them that the Romans mean to kill him. Peter is all like "nah, that doesn't have to happen." And Jesus is like "yeah it does, and how would it benefit me for them not to?"
It's a very relevant quote here, not because of any allegience to Jesus' self-abnegation. But because as a Black person whose ancestors were enslaved in this country, you gotta have soul.
Soul power. Soul Brothers and Soul Sisters. Soul2Soul. Losing soul is losing face, is losing community, is assimilation into the global Black killing machine.
There is no greater loss of soul than running for president. Except maybe serving as VP to a guy governing to the slight left of Ron Reagan.
I don't give a fuck if you have the sharpest silk press in the world, which Harris certainly does. What's Black about a Black president?
The communalism of such a term, the implied mutual cultural pride, cannot jive with being the person who benefits most from genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo. What about facilitating and profiting from a genocide in Palestine says Black Pride?
It's fitting that Jessie Jackson, insisted we prefer African American just days after the failure of his presidential run.
What good is it to run the world if you lose your soul? What good is it to run the world if you can never again be part of the world?
What good is a Black president if their longings undermine the very ancestors who “brought them thus far on the way."
These are the questions tarot's World ask of us. After all that trying, was it worth it? Who are we when we're on the top, when we have the upper hand? Why have you studied, struggled and strived? Who did it help?
It's back to the beginning if the answer is only yourself.
Tarot in Community is the space where I teach tarot politically. It's a home for intuitive strategies for surviving capitalism. It supports tarot readers in their transformation into intuitive strategists.
The strategy part of tarot is often understated, but every professional tarot reader is a strategist. We work against the machinations of the powerful. We help our clients figure out how they will survive, thrive, love, and grieve.
We read tarot with our eye on The World and the world. What success can we create in a world like ours? What would that success even look like.
This week, we pulled a political spread created by a member in real time at our Tarot Swap, trying to find our place in what's to come. It was impactful and scary.
Just a bunch of queer and trans BIPOC trying to figure out how to survive the rise of Trump *or* Harris.
The World is a card of completion, of cycles well traveled. It's a card of travel, dynamism, and culmination.
I'm sure to Kamala Harris, her presidential run seems like the end of history itself. There's a manufactured optimism, a tactic borrowed from Obama, that insists upon itself.
"This is a good thing," it whispers "you wanted this." It's only a good thing if you believe that America is a trafficker of good things.
We live in a genocidal settler colony that gives money and bodies to other colonies to do its genocidal bidding. We have never fully abolished slavery, only exported and expanded it every way this colony can.
So to want to sit on the top of that hill of beans, that mountain of smoking bodies? It can only come from a brutal imagination.
The World wants us to believe that the ends justify the means. Depends on the ends. Depends on the means.
A Black president who rides in on a tide of liberation and landback and communal governance? Right, never gunna happen. Even then, the hierarchy would spoil it, and corrupt it.
I won't settle for less. I wont accept any old Black president. I, for one, am not coconut pilled.
Not for some straw man argument either. Black women are great, Black women are the future. I have many brilliant AKAs in my life that I love. My husband is a Howard grad x2 — undergrad and medicine — he made Phi Beta Kappa there.
Kamala Harris' run comes through these things, but the context in which she emerges is the cynical elite capture of Black identity. Not Black Power. Not Black Pride. She exists in the context of the global Black elite, small though they may be, and their exploitation of every other Black person on earth.
What good does it do to run the world, and immiserate the vast majority of it?
image: hey, i'm cyree jarelle. I run Collective Cartomancy. I help queers, feminists, and leftists connect with their intuition using tarot and cartomancy. More on me.
As a rejecter of Pollyanna bullshit around tarot, rosy views of The Sun card are a major sticking point for me. Because The Sun may make us optimistic, it may get us pregnant, it may greet us on vacation, it may even make some shit better--but that’s not why it’s here.
In fact, The Sun barely cares about any of that.