a very short story about hegemony

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

My cousin's husband says his family was robbed by undocumented immigrants when he was a kid, only he doesn't say "undocumented." That's what the cops told his family. To me it sounds like something cops would say if they couldn't solve a crime, but I might be wrong. 

He baits me: Wait until they come for you. Do YOU want to spend your time with criminals? Share your bed with gang members? 

I tell him I have spent a lot of time with gang members, most of them citizens, and it was just fine. I say MS 13 is an American export. We should apologize to El Salvador. I say I didn't know that wanting someone not to be deported and dehumanized meant I had to marry them. 

My cousin's husband dares me to share a bathroom with a trans woman, only he doesn't say "trans woman." I do, that very weekend, in a pizza restaurant in a college town. I wash my hands next to her in the trough sink. I think she is kind of cute, if I need to choose one of my cousin's enemies to marry. Later she brings us our pizza; it's always good to have a known hand-washer for your server.

Look, it's not often that I get to feel smug. To say I have done the thing someone finds terrifying, with no fear whatsoever. I am afraid of so much. I am afraid of my own cells, my own thoughts. I am afraid of being abandoned for something I didn't do or something I did. I am afraid of hurting someone, of ruining everything. I am afraid of people like my cousin's husband, whom I remember as a blond teddy bear of a man, with a bushy mustache and a round face.

Of course we have this conversation on Facebook. I haven't talked to him in person in decades because my cousin doesn't talk to my uncle. My cousin said my uncle tried to tell her how to raise her kids. My uncle said my cousin was hard-headed like her mother. 

The other reason I only talk to my cousin's husband on Facebook is because I never really talked to him in person. He and my cousin are both Deaf, but my cousin was coached in speech and lip reading; she assimilated. Before she became hard-headed, I guess. And so I could talk to her even though I never learned more than finger-spelling. She was funny and smart and sometimes, yes, angry. 

We used to give her owls when she was a teenager, because she collected them. Later we found out she never collected owls until we started giving them to her. 

Her husband only signed, never used his voice. Sometimes he kind of pantomimed, and I could tell he was funny too, and I could see why they liked each other. 

I rarely finger-spelled, because I was shy, and I knew it was slow and feeble, and I didn't want to be slow and feeble. 

My cousin and her husband moved to the southernmost part of San Diego, to a big new house that looked like every big new house. They had a kid who looked like my uncle, and another who looked like my cousin and was autistic. How racist do you have to be to vote for a man who makes fun of disabled people when 75% of your family is disabled. A victory for racism, for Facebook, for the algorithm, for the streets I walk with my protest signs. I never learned to sign, and I rarely speak Spanish. I can say un poquito, lo siento, lo siento.