I began part I of this post with appreciation of Michael Gerson’s Washington Post op ed declaring (FINALLY!) that the racism he — a George W. Bush speechwriter – had witnessed in recent days was a bridge too far. I then spent some time talking about the government’s role in facilitating racism, and showed how a heinous example Gerson had provided showed how average citizens often facilitated racism.
I now turn to a second contention of the Gerson op ed: one that has become a common refrain, but one that hinders progress as we begin to grapple with where the racism and the violence actually began. Gerson contends that, “[t]his evil — the evil of white supremacy, resulting in dehumanization, inhumanity and murder — is the worst stain, the greatest crime, of U.S. history.” Without meaning to, by grounding his words temporally, with the marker of “U.S. history,” Gerson begins the story of the evil of white supremacy in the wrong place. The U.S. formally came to be in 1776, but slaves landed on the shores of what ultimately became the colonies as early as 1607 in Jamestown. Even if Gerson accounted for that 159 years in his demarcation of, “U.S. history,” tales of the many battles that Native peoples fought on their own (the Powhatan confederacy nearly wiping out Jamestown in 1622, the Puritans defeating the Pequots in the 1630’s), against the British, colonists or the Spanish in the 17th century do not appear in U.S. history books. Rather, the pre-colonial period becomes a footnote: “Columbus discovered America,” and that impedes our understanding and acknowledgement that Native genocide is, in fact, the original sin of those who went on to, “found,” this nation. (A note of irony: in researching this piece, I read about the indigenous peoples of North America fighting off the Spanish for control of what is now Texas in the 17th century. Despite that fact, people perceived to be LatinX lost their lives last weekend because of the racist belief of the El Paso shooter that Brown people didn’t belong in that region.) The wars were followed by treaties (oft broken), relocations and the trail(s) of tears, attempts to deprive Native peoples of their language and culture by shipping Native children to boarding schools, the Dawes Act which sought to confiscate Native lands in the West and to assimilate Native peoples and make them (ironically) “truly American.” Among the many modern day travesties committed against Native peoples is a case I previously blogged about: Baby Veronica, in which the U.S. Supreme Court engages in a contorted (non)reading of the Indian Child Welfare Act in order to grant custody of a Native child not to her father, but to a white couple.
I close — for now — with a video of Princeton Prof. Eddie Glaude bursting the, “this is not who we are bubble.” Trump, he explains, is a symptom, not the disease … “either we’re gonna learn from this, or we’re gonna do it again and again, and again.” At less than a week post the most recent pair of mass shootings, the progress seems decidedly mixed: Fox news is pushing theories contained in the El Paso shooter’s manifesto, a Nebraska Republican lawmaker has chided his party for enabling white supremacy, and they have invited him to switch parties, a U.S. senator has opined that banning assault weapons would be “unpopular,” while Cong Mike Turner, who boasts a 93% NRA voting record has gone on record in support of ending the sales of military style assault weapons not least because his daughter was on the scene (mercifully unharmed) of the Dayton shooting.
Our learning from history will not be complete until genocide ceases to be something that Hitler did or that happened elsewhere … we have to talk about what it means that this country was born as colonists were trying to wipe out Native peoples and nations basically for being inconveniently located where the colonists wished to live, what it means that while we were fighting to free Germany and Poland from the Nazis, we had locked up Japanese Americans stateside, and were in the throes of Jim Crow as we worked to create the United Nations, and what it means for us as a nation of immigrants to find ourselves in the grip of an Administration that firmly believes that some immigrants are, “more equal,” or more worthy than others.
Glaude? Pic of Native folks pre-colonial?
Thoughts from the Rabbit Hole 