Rainbow Coalition: Unity over Division

For about a year now, since the opening of the 2020 Presidential campaign, we have been hearing anxious calls for “unity” from the corporate shills who lead the Democratic Party. The message is always some variation of the absolute need for us to come together against the racism, misogyny, corruption, stupidity, self-dealing, and overall irresponsibility of Donald Trump and the Republican Party he has taken captive. 

The subtext of the call for unity, though, is the notion that some of us are actually responsible for his rise to the White House. When pressed, the “centrists” ask that we shut up about questions they consider “divisive.” They claim that those of us who insist on raising issues like the climate crisis, imperialist adventures, voter suppression, policy-driven income inequality, police impunity, school privatization, and ballooning student debt are making the perfect the enemy of the good and jeopardizing our chances of defeating Trump. The platform they propose instead can be simply stated: “Look at him! We’re not as bad as him!”

For Senators and Representatives in Washington this single-minded focus on Party and on what is the lowest-common-denominator that can assure them an election win makes good sense. They all seem to be fixated on continuing in their positions, as if there were no alternative way of living. (Except, of course moving up: Representative to Senator, Senator to President.) And its not just their own reelection, either, its their whole crew, because the capitalist party that controls government wins enhanced access to the bribes (oh, sorry, campaign contributions) distributed by lobbyists and other representatives of monopoly capital.

So when some Eliot Engel (my Congressman) tries to convince me not to vote for his opponent in the primary election I totally get his agenda: “Look at Trump! I’m not as bad as Trump!” He wants me to ignore the fact that after thirty years in the House his main claim to fame is getting in a handshake with every President at the State of the Union address. He hasn’t even been opposed by a Republican for the last three elections so his calls for unity feel less about substance than they are about his career. When some Henry Cuellar from a completely safe Democratic district in South Texas cries (as he did yesterday) about a “circular firing squad,” he is asking us to ignore the fact that he votes with Trump 70% of the time. When corporate Democrats whine that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t paying the $250,000 annual dues to their call center they want me to ignore the fact that she is raising money from everyday voters instead of dialing fat cats for cash all day long from those phone banks.

Nationally these arguments come down to our need to vote for a Joe Biden or a Pete Buttigieg instead of a Bernie Sanders or an Elizabeth Warren because Sanders and Warren are “alienating” somebody. My problem is that the only ones who seem to be alienated by those two are the monopoly capitalists who are profiting from student debt, medical insurance, pharmaceutical costs, banking, and fossil fuels. I want to know why the call for unity doesn’t go both ways, why the Democratic leaders in Washington like Representative Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer aren’t willing to unite with us.

But all this is about elections and political parties. It doesn’t even address the issues that divide us so much that they turn people off from politics completely. One recent example is natural gas pipelines. It is convenient to point to Orange Hitler’s support of fossil fuels and of his reversal of the Obama administration shut down of the Dakota Access Pipeline. It is less convenient for Democratic partisans to remember Obama’s support for natural gas, and for oil oil pipelines like Keystone XL and DAPL. Yes, this current President proudly (and stupidly) asserts his support for fossil fuels that are losing the financial support of the market. Yes, he repeats nonsensical claims that there is no climate change. But the Democratic leadership is only better in that they acknowledge a “climate crisis” for which they propose no solution. Nancy Pelosi is happy to mock the Green New Deal. Trump enviously ridicules teen climate activist Greta Thunberg; Obama graciously applauds her. Neither has a plan to reverse global CO₂. 

The pipeline conflict received greater notice a few years ago because of the issue of Native sovereignty. The Dakota Access Pipeline had been mapped to cross under the Missouri River above Bismarck, South Dakota but public (white) opinion worried about the possibility of crude oil leaking into their drinking water. So the crossing was relocated to just above the Standing Rock Lakota Reservation, where any leak would affect Lakotas there and downstream on the Cheyenne River Reservation instead of the white people of Bismarck. Tribal leadership objected unsuccessfully until a group of teens running to Washington, D.C. (on foot) drew Indigenous people from all over the Americas to protest. The protesters’ camp grew to include thousands of Natives from many tribes along with their allies. The construction company used police and private security to attack the protesters with dogs, pepper spray, so-called “non-lethal” riot guns, and - in sub-freezing temperatures - water cannons. They arrested hundreds of protesters, including journalists, and held them in kennels. President Obama eventually granted a stay of construction for the river crossing which was rescinded the next month by President Trump.

But here’s what interests me right now. When Elizabeth Warren declared her candidacy for the Democratic nomination for President, she chose to double down on her long-standing claim of Cherokee ancestry. When Natives rejected this claim, they were immediately denounced by her supporters as defenders of Trump! Warren’s supporters acted as though indigenous sovereignty has no significance except insofar as it buttresses “my side” against “your side;” as if the only question that matters is Donald Trump. 

Now Trump has a long history of  contempt for Native people, which has been a matter of public record because some East Coast tribes were his competitors in the casino gambling business. In the early nineties he testified in Congress that the Connecticut Mohegans “don’t look like Indians to me”! In 2000 he secretly funded an ad campaign against the Akwesasne Mohawks claiming that they were gangsters and drug dealers which resulted in him having to pay a $250,000 fine and issue a public apology. As President he held a ceremony for Navajo Code Talkers against the backdrop of a portrait of the genocidaire Andrew Jackson. And he persists in referring to Senator Warren as “Pocahontas” who history reminds us was a victim of child rape.

All of that is undeniably racist. But white claims of Native ancestry are also racist. Historically they have been a means of theft: claiming to be Cherokee or Creek in Oklahoma (where Senator Warren was born and raised) was a way for white grifters to claim Native allotments under the Dawes Act at the time of statehood. Such claims were also genocidal. David Grann’s 2017 Killers of the Flower Moon is the horrifying story of a white man marrying an Osage woman then murdering her, her sister, her brother, and her mother to get all of their land allotments. Tribes are polities with their own rules for membership. When Senator Warren used a (highly-suspect) DNA test to assert the truth of her family story, she was erasing the sovereignty of the Cherokee Nation which decides who is and who is not Cherokee. But she was also perpetuating an ugly Oklahoma history.

It is easy to see Trump’s racism. It is easy to condemn it. But when the anti-Trump politician who you like engages in indigenous erasure by claiming to be Indigenous you, too, are racist if  you choose to defend her and to attack the Native people who criticize her. You are saying that Native claims only matter to you when they support the political team you choose. You believe in “unity” with Indigenous people only when it goes against Trump.

The refusal to see racism except when it is expressed by Donald Trump isn’t unique to issues of Native sovereignty. Trump famously opened his Presidential campaign by descending a golden elevator and addressing a few dozen people who he paid $50 each to attend. He told them that Mexicans are criminals, rapists, and drug dealers. He subsequently (and bizarrely) promised a giant wall along the entire 2000 miles of the US-Mexico border, and insisted that Mexico would pay for it. He has managed, in fact, to replace about sixty miles of previously-existing barrier at US-taxpayer expense. But he has also managed to deny entry to thousands of asylum seekers. He has managed to separate children from their parents and to hold them in impromptu prisons for protracted periods. He has drawn the opposition of huge numbers of Americans for this cruel treatment of refugees.

Trump has failed to deport the roughly ten million immigrants currently estimated to live in the US with expired or improper documents, but that was one of his more unbelievable promises anyway. He has also failed to match the record number of deportations achieved by his nemesis, President Obama. Democrats are mostly silent about this last number. They are happy to denounce Trump’s immigration policies as cruel, but choose to forget that Obama, too, separated children from their families and kept them in concrete-floored cages. 

Immigration activists haven’t forgotten, though. And they have to wonder about the commitment of people who only began supporting their cause when it was convenient and served as another strike against Trump. It is now considered divisive to ask what policy Democrats propose for the border and for immigration: “Look at that guy! We’re not as bad as that guy!” And I have to ask why anybody should favor “unity” with people who refuse to discuss the things that matter to them.

I don’t want to belabor this argument. I will simply ask the “moderate” Democrats who are demanding unity what is their position on Black Lives, on surveillance of mosques, on gerrymandering and voter purges in blue states, on FISA warrants, on coups in Venezuela and Bolivia, on police impunity, on free college tuition, on school privatization, on single-payer health care… I may end up having to vote for one of you for President because, in truth, you are “not as bad as that guy.” But I want to know: Do your calls for unity also extend to your supporting our policies?

It was not my intention when I began writing this to criticize the notion of unity, just to ask what kind of unity, with whom, and based on what principles. Because the truth is that I see altogether too much conscious division of our ranks. A few weeks ago we commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Illinois Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton by the FBI and the Chicago police. I asked then what made a 21-year old so dangerous that the entire coercive power of the State was brought down on him instead of somebody else. And I suggested that the answer was the way in which he was bringing people together. Chairman Fred called it a “Rainbow Coalition” before Reverend Jesse Jackson started using that phrase, and it was a revolutionary coalition, including the Black Panther Party, the Puerto Rican Young Lords Party, the American Indian Movement, the Chicano Brown Berets, and white youth in the Young Patriots and in SDS. Chairman Fred didn’t deny the need for any of those groups. He simply worked to keep them from fighting one another as the repressive state preferred. (And if you have any doubt about that preference, just read about the FBI’s COINTELPRO.)

The people who want to divide us are everywhere and their work isn’t all that hard. It is easy, for example, for African Americans to see the contempt in which so many African and Afro Caribbean immigrants hold them. It has long been obvious that the first thing immigrants to this country - of all races! - learn is anti-Black racism. Immigrant cabbies learn to avoid African American riders before they learn their way around the city. Immigrant shopkeepers learn to suspiciously follow African American customers around their stores. One year I asked my ESL students to write a brief memoir about coming to America. Every girl wrote about a loved one they had been forced to leave behind. Every boy wrote about a haircut. Each one - Yemeni, Pakistani, Haitian, Dominican - had gone to the barber to look more American and each one had come home to family members who became enraged because they now looked like an African American.

I don’t really need to belabor this. For over a century now, middle-class West Indian immigrants have looked down on African Americans for not being more thrifty and industrious as they started businesses and accumulated property, not having their own direct experience with the economic terrorists who seized Black-owned farms and stores and murdered the owners. In this new generation immigrants from Africa have arrived to join in the quiet chorus of contempt. Their disdain doesn’t escape African Americans, or - for that matter - the immigrants’ own children who are brought up in the same white supremacist system as the children of African Americans.

Native American tribes like the Creeks, Cherokees, and Seminoles have taken great pains to exclude their members of African descent. African Americans have taken great pride in the role Black units (“Buffalo Soldiers”) took in wars of colonial conquest of Indigenous people and land.

Mexican Americans - especially in New Mexico - have insisted that they are “Spanish.” They go so far as to celebrate the bloody Spanish conquista of the Pueblo tribes. And when present-day Pueblo people object to public fiestas commemorating the murder of their ancestors, these Hispanos act like the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy, crying that their “heritage” is being sacrificed in the name of political correctness.

When Mexican Americans do claim Indigenous heritage, though, there are always some Native people ready to denounce them as “pretendians” who are trying to steal an ancestry that isn’t theirs.

And I could go on. I haven’t even begun to discuss the long history of racism in the union movement, enough that workers of color could be excused for saying that the main goal of unions was to exclude them. There is more than enough fertile ground for our enemies to sow suspicion and dissension among us. White supremacy poisons everything.

But I think it is worth noticing when monopoly capitalism lifts up certain voices of “resistance,” especially when they are voices that divide rather than unify. First, a historic example.

From the time that the US Congress seized the Black Hills in explicit violation of the Fort Laramie Treaties, members of various tribes with claims to the hills met together to seek some sort of restitution. For roughly forty-five years those conferences of Lakota, Dakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho elders frustrated federal officials who wanted them to start looking “forward”, meaning abandon their culture, their sovereignty, their land claims… even their existence as peoples.

In 1920, though, the Department of the Interior decided that a lawsuit was a good idea because it would finally allow the tribes to resolve this matter and stop dwelling on “the past.”* At the very next treaty conference the effect of turning this into a matter for compensation became evident. The first order of business was to exclude the Dakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho representatives from the meeting! This is how a potentially-successful class-action suit can be divisive. The possibility of a cash payout creates the incentive to reduce the size of the class.

The current version of this is #ADOS. The moment that reparations for slavery became an actual topic of discussion in the Democratic primary field we saw this hashtag emerge. I can’t deny its popularity, but I can question its origin and the role of Republican (and foreign) bots in spreading it. And I can say with assurance that white supremacy in the real world doesn’t distinguish. Racist cops don’t discriminate between ADOS and other Black people. When four NYPD plainclothes officers cut down Amadou Diallo in a hail of bullets his life wasn’t saved because he was African. The police who sodomized Abner Louima didn’t stop because he is Haitian.

It’s not just about Black people, either. When a Navajo man, speaking his own language, in his own territory, is ordered to “Go back to your country!” by some random white person, we should see more than a bizarre irony. We should see the grounds for alliance between Native people who come from one side or the other of the Rio Grande, independent of whether one has treaty rights in the United States or not. When we see that the most disproportionate levels of police violence against any group in this country are against Indigenous people, we should see the basis of an alliance between African Americans and Natives. And when we see environmental racism, employment discrimination, and housing discrimination against Natives, Latinos, and African Americans, we should find the basis for unity over division.

And this is the heart of the matter for me. It isn’t about Democrat or Republican. It is about resistance to monopoly capital. It is about resistance to racism. It is about a revolutionary rainbow coalition. 

*  The US Supreme Court decided in favor of the Lakota in 1980; sixty years after the tribes were given permission to sue, 103 years after the land was illegally taken. The Court awarded the tribes $106 million. The  Lakota refused the settlement, demanding instead the return of the land. Now it is 2020 and the matter remains unresolved.

Can a civilian child have PTSD? Not if she is your political opponent.

And now we are treated to the spectacle of partisan claims that Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar is "disrespecting veterans" by saying that children in war zones - including herself - can suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder!

These are clearly bad-faith arguments. I sincerely doubt that Representative Jim Banks (R, Indiana) or anybody like him would get up and denounce advocates for children who have been kidnapped, or physically abused or caught up in human trafficking. No, they really dislike Representative Omar: she is a woman, she is Muslim, she is Black, and she won’t shut up or be intimidated. Their lies about her go on and on. They insist on circulating a photo of a soldier in the Somali regular army (from before her birth!) claiming that it shows her in a terrorist training camp. They insist that she is a homophobe who wants to punish gay people with public stoning despite her long-standing and very public support for LGBTQ rights. And they are quite certain that she is an antisemite despite her warm relationship with the Minneapolis Jewish community.

But I come back to the disbelief that a Somali child could experience PTSD and I think there is more to see than just party hacks lobbing a denunciation that they hope will stick. It has to do with how we view African children. It has to do with our myopic insistence on seeing the rest of the world in terms of their governments’ alignment for or against the US State Department and American capital. It has to do with our insistence on centering ourselves in every narrative, regardless of where it is taking place. 

Somalia has been without consistent central government since the successful coup against President Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 when Omar was nine years old. All that most Americans know about the country is what they saw in the 2001 film Black Hawk Down about the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, when Omar was already living in a refugee camp in Kenya. But the violence and civil war of her childhood began before she was even born. It was the aftermath of a 1977 war between Ethiopia and Somalia, a war that became one of those proxy battles between the US and the Soviet Union that so characterized the Cold War.

When Siad Barre took power in a military coup in 1969 he declared the Somali Democratic Republic as a Marxist-Leninist state and allied it with the Soviet Union. The Soviets were happy to have naval and military bases in the strategically-important Horn of Africa, between the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea and adjacent to Ethiopia, which was then ruled by the Emperor Haile Selassie and was allied to the United States. Then the Marxist-Leninist Derg ousted Haile Selassie in 1974 and established the Provisional Military Government of Socialist Ethiopia. An outsider might be forgiven for thinking this would have brought peace to the region. But that is the great-power chauvinism we have to avoid, the idea that all these countries exist to be bit players in our story. Siad Barre still had the ambition of taking over a large border region called Ogaden which was primarily inhabited by ethnic Somalis. He sent in his military and had enormous early success, occupying most of the area.

Do you see a dilemma for the Kremlin here? Do you wonder how they negotiate a war between two allied and explicitly Marxist-Leninist regimes? I don’t. At that time the Somali Democratic Republic was a nation of 3 million people; Socialist Ethiopia had a population of 46 million. 16,000 Cuban troops, 1500 Soviet advisors and two brigades from South Yemen turned the tide of battle. Somalia was driven out of Ogaden after the loss of one-third of their soldiers and half their air force.

Do you see a dilemma for the State Department here? Do you wonder how they respond to this war among avowed Communists? The United States traded its old bases in Ethiopia for old Soviet bases in Somalia. Somalia continued to be a one-party Marxist-Leninist state under the leadership of the Somali Socialist Revolutionary Party and Mohamed Siad Barre. But now it was allied with the United States, along with the People’s Republic of China.

I hope the reader understands that I recount all this history of changed allegiances to show that neither ideology nor history - whether of alliance, enmity, or friendship - can outweigh geopolitical concerns for powers like the US and the Soviet Union. And I hope the reader understands that regional rulers, like those in Somalia and Ethiopia, have their regional concerns and recruit whatever stronger allies they can in order to promote their own interests.

The Ethiopian victory in Ogaden did not bring peace in either country. We are concerned here with the childhood of Ilhan Omar, so I will continue without a discussion of Ethiopia’s war with Eritrea. In Somalia, Siad Barre’s giant and costly misstep left him struggling to retain control. He reacted as dictators do, with violence and repression. In the northeast he moved against the Majerteens, Ilhan Omar’s dad’s people. The Red Berets murdered 2000 clan leaders, raped an untold number of women, killed livestock in the hundreds of thousands, and smashed reservoirs. Thousands died of thirst. When Omar’s family left the increasingly-unsafe capital it was not to their devastated homeland, but to Baidoa, about 150 miles northwest of Mogadishu. When the civil war made that unsafe, too, they fled across the border to a refugee camp in Kenya.

It is worth noting that the United States did not abandon Siad Barre because of the massacre mentioned in the previous paragraph. The United States did not abandon him when his regime killed 50,000 in an aerial bombardment of the city of Hargeisa. Much of the army deserted to join tribal militias that formed to protect their people from his army. He replaced them with Marehan tribal militiamen, whose salary consisted of what they could loot. And this didn’t lead the US to abandon Siad Barre, either. It was the fall of the Soviet Union. Once the USSR ceased to be a global adversary, the United States didn’t need Somalia as a counterbalance. In fact, without Soviet support, the Ethiopian Derg was thrown out of power with the support of the United States. If you wonder how the US press dealt with all of this you can go back into the archives of all the newspapers and discover that they barely covered it at all. Occasional feature stories appeared, always reported from the safety of Kenya, and usually with cryptic references to Marxists fighting “hardline” Marxists.

Before summarizing all this I want to return to Black Hawk Down. The events covered in that film took place in Mogadishu in 1993, after Ilhan Omar and her family left the refugee camp in Kenya and arrived in New York City, so they technically have no part in this story. But several things make that movie important nevertheless. When I first sat down to write this I was thinking that anybody familiar with Black Hawk Down would, of course, understand how a Somali child could suffer from PTSD. But then I remembered that this was only true of the 1999 book, not the 2001 movie. The book was based on interviews on all sides of the conflict: members of Delta Force, Army Rangers, helicopter pilots, yes, but also fighters in Mohamed Farrah Aidid’s Somali National Alliance and in rival Somali militias. If you read that book you get to know individuals on all sides as people. The movie, by contrast, is only about Americans. If you see the movie you know Somalis only as an endlessly-increasing number of anonymous enemies. No matter how many of them the protagonists may kill, more pop up with RPG’s and AK47’s. The only thing I can compare it to is The Walking Dead. How could the viewer ever empathize with them? How could the viewer ever imagine their trauma at having heavily-armed Americans dropping suddenly into the middle of their city, covered by aerial gunships, to kidnap their leader?

Then there is that leader. We remember the Battle of Mogadishu and the 19 American servicemen who lost their lives there, but who today remembers why it was so important that Aidid be captured? Mohamed Farrah Aidid was a general in the Somali Army who served in the Ogaden War and later became chief of intelligence. He was also one of the generals who deposed Siad Barre. By the time of the events in Black Hawk Down, one of the other generals, Ali Mahdi Muhammad, had declared himself president and been accepted as such by the UN, despite the fact that he didn’t even control all of Mogadishu, not to mention the rest of the country. Armed UN troops were backing Ali Mahdi Muhammad’s militia and they had clashed with Aidid’s militia, so the UN wanted Aidid to be arrested. Even at the time Americans wondered why this was worth the lives of so many Americans and - to be honest - the humiliation of seeing Somalis  on television celebrating over their bodies and the wreckage of $20-million helicopters. Democrats and Republicans bickered over whose fault it was. Then, when Clinton withdrew the troops because this debacle was so unpopular, they bickered again about whose fault that was.

That is what most Americans know. We have a limited attention span in this country so I doubt that many are aware that the Somali Civil War continues to this day. Moreover, I doubt that many people know that it began before Representative Omar was born. So when her Republican opposition isn’t calling for her hanging (yes, that’s exactly what her opponent in the last election advocated!) they’re on some other BS, like how could she be traumatized when she was already in New York when all this (meaning all they know about) happened.

Now I would like to summarize. For most people in Washington - Democratic or Republican, Bill Clinton or either Bush - Somalia only ever mattered insofar as it related to the worldwide confrontation with the Soviet Union. Even Somalis like President Mohamed Siad Barre and General Mohamed Farrah Aidid and President Ali Mahdi Muhammad were only ever meant to be pawns, not real people. Even our anticommunism never mattered; we were all too happy to align ourselves with the communist Siad Barre once he lost his alliance with the Soviet Union. We aren’t even able to imagine Somalis as people in a movie based on a book that did. 

Now a Somali child who was a refugee from the violence that was tangential to that Cold War (a violence fueled with huge numbers of heavy weapons provided by the superpowers to their client states) enters the United States House of Representatives. She dares to tell her own story. She dares to treat her story as if it matters, as if she matters, as if a pawn of a pawn is a real person! And that is why partisans like Indiana Republican Jim Banks think she is “disrespecting veterans” by describing her PTSD.

I have said elsewhere that Representative Omar is everything that the Washington elite of both parties hate. She is a woman. She is smart. She is Black. She is African. She is an immigrant. She is Muslim and shows it by covering her head with a hijab outside her home. But what they hate most is her refusal to be bossed and her refusal to shut up. She insists on telling her own story and she insists on telling her truth. When you believe the bullshit about her, when you repeat the bullshit about her, you say more about yourself than you do about Ilhan Omar.

#IStandWithIlhan