Still more: Native Americans

Yesterday's post concluded with the final item in the "bill of particulars" against King George III that made up the body of the Declaration of Independence. It began, “He Has Excited Domestic Insurrections Amongst Us,” which was a kind of coded, or perhaps shame-faced, complaint that the Royal governors and army had threatened to arm captive Africans against their kidnappers. 

Jefferson and his cosigners were less coy in finishing that sentence. The Declaration goes on to to say that he (the King) “has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” Let us ignore for a moment the striking language about a “known rule of warfare” being an “undistinguished destruction of all” which is so much more apt as a description of the settlers genocidal attacks on Indigenous people. What is equally striking is the complete lack of euphemism in this clause. Indian Savages. More racial language, no?

Well, no. That is actually the point I want to contest. I described racism in the earlier posts as a convenient shorthand for white supremacist rule. I have argued that it misses the power dynamics of exploitation and that it confuses a system of social caste with “hatred.” I also want to argue that it allows people to think they understand the attacks on Native Americans and Mexican Americans because they have this prism of Black-white relations to see them through. I want to argue that we also mislead ourselves in understanding other forms of national oppression in this country when we describe them as racism.

Let’s look at the differences between African Americans and Natives in the history of this country. Most people will say that the US robbed Indigenous people of their land and Black people of their labor. That’s not a bad starting point, although it misses the extent to which genocidal economics and politics robbed them both of their lives. It understates the number of Natives who were enslaved. And it dramatically understates the vast acreage of land that has been stolen from Black people since the end of Reconstruction.

That last point hides an important distinction, though. Native people - like Black people - have been systematically robbed of their individual farms and ranches over the last century and more. But what has been more important to the tribes is the loss of sovereignty over lands. The difference is so important and yet is often lost. I live in a house in the Bronx. My wife and I own it, along with the land it sits on, roughly one-tenth of an acre. But it is still in the Bronx and we are still subject to the laws of New York City and State and of the United States regarding what we do here. I can’t allow my garbage to pile up. I can’t burn it either. I am required to maintain the sidewalk in front so that is safe for others to walk by. I am required to maintain a sewer line running out back and down the street to wear it joins a city line. I know these things because I have been obliged to fix them.

The language of Indian treaties is clear. The tribes ceded land that was under their sovereign rule to the Federal government, sometimes after negotiation, sometimes after a military defeat, sometimes after a military victory. The tribes reserved the balance of the land for themselves, under their tribal government. And - it is critical to add - those cessions were only to the Federal government: the Non-Intercourse Act of 1790 barred either states or individuals from buying Indian land without the approval of the Federal government. 

This is a good time to point out a piece of half-understood nonsense that is often trotted out about Native Americans and land ownership. People are fond of saying that Natives believed that land could no more be “owned” than could the air or the rain. And if, by ownership, we mean a title that can be transferred for cash to another person that is certainly true. But if we mean collective sovereignty - that a certain territory is, for example, the land of the Kanienʼkehá꞉ka - then it is patently false. The people of New York and Quebec have always known whose land that was, even when they have needed forcible reminders. The maps of Native territories that have become more popular recently in some circles are actually especially misleading in this regard. They show vague territories, without firm lines for the natural boundaries established by river basins, and they never show permanent settlements. That leaves the viewer with the false notion that the tribes just wandered over an ill-defined space. Historic atlases that mark Native towns are, sadly, very rare. Atlases that mark particular spaces like farms, springs, quarries, clam beds, fishing stations, and hunting surrounds with the tribes (or families) responsible for them are even rarer. But let us be clear. The enemies of those Natives knew exactly where those properties were.

In 1779, George Washington ordered Major General John Sullivan to take four brigades to the Susquehanna Valley to “destroy and devastate” those of the Six Nations who were allied with the British. Sullivan’s troops torched forty towns, burning the homes and town walls, the crops, the fruit trees, and the food and seed barns. They killed or captured as many Haudenosaunee as they could. And these were towns, not camps. At Gayagaanhe, on Cayuga Lake, Sullivan’s scouts described fifteen large longhouses, along with fields running to the forest a few miles away. Chenussio, on the Genesee River, had 130 wood houses, many with glass windows. The Americans called Chonodote “Peach Town” because the Cayugas who lived there maintained orchards of over 1000 peach trees. When the American troops destroyed Tionondorage, on Schoharie Creek, an officer of the New York regiment wrote that the Mohawk inhabitants lived much better than the white farmers of nearby Fort Hunter, each family with “plenty of grain, several horses, cows, and wagons.” I doubt his favorable impressions were much comfort to those families when all their possessions were destroyed and they were taken prisoner. But my larger point is that everybody in those towns knew whose house was whose, whose corn was whose, whose trees were whose. So did the neighboring white farmers. Towns in the Mohawk Valley were typically moved every ten years or so to a nearby place with fresher resources, but that didn’t mean that the people were “roaming over the land” with “no idea of ownership.”

There are two absolutely essential points here. The first is that Indians are not another “race,” but members of political units other than the United States, whether one calls them tribes or nations. The Constitution excluded Indigenous people (“Indians not taxed”). The 14th Amendment, extending citizenship to everyone born in the United States, nevertheless excluded Natives. Even the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 did not extinguish the tribes; Congress didn’t try to do that until later. So to be Indian is not to have some particular ancestry or skin color. It is to be Cheyenne or Shawnee, Seminole or Seneca. 

The second is that Native people have rights that are reserved to them by their treaties with the United States. Some of those rights are the lands that they reserved to themselves in those treaties. Others are for annual payments in return for the lands that they ceded to the United States in those treaties. The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that Congress has the power to unilaterally change the terms of those treaties. But the Court has also ruled - repeatedly - that those treaties remain in force until or unless Congress does explicitly change them… regardless of the passage of time or changed practice.

Why is the first point so important? Among other reasons because you don’t get to decide who is or is not Mohegan, for example, anymore than the British Parliament (or some random person in, say, Sweden) determines US citizenship requirements. In 1993, Donald Trump testified in Congress against allowing the Mohegan Tribe to open a casino in Uncasville, Connecticut, largely because he saw it cutting into his then-still-profitable Atlantic City casinos. He argued that the Mohegans aren’t Indians at all, famously telling the committee: “They don’t look like Indians to me.” When Representative George Miller (D, CA) told him that tribal citizenship wasn’t determined by a Trump “look test,” the future President fired back, “Why don’t you approve it for everybody, then, sir?” Which kind of goes to the precise issue: Tribal sovereignty means that state governments can only regulate what happens on a reservation to the extent that Congress has explicitly given them that power. (Bryan v. Itasca County, 426 U.S. 373 (1976)) Meaning that the anti-gambling laws which most states still had in the 70’s and 80’s did not apply to reservations.

It also begs the question “What should an Indian look like?” If we try to imagine an answer in racial terms we can - I suppose - visualize some sort of idealized Indian, maybe Siŋté Máza, and Oglala Lakota performer with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, who was reportedly a model for the old nickel. But if we imagine an answer in political terms, (an Indian is a member of an Indian tribe) he or she could look like anybody. Saying to a tribal member, “You don’t look Indian,” becomes as stupid as saying to a person of any descent other than Native, “You don’t look American.” We are American by virtue of being born here or naturalized, regardless of our ancestry. Membership rules vary from tribe to tribe, but they are their rules. And, I should add, a Navajo who “looks Indian” to you (or the President) doesn’t thereby become a Choctaw.

More tomorrow.

Still more on the shorthand use of the word racism

The word “racism” is a convenient shorthand for the white supremacism which still rules our banks, corporations, real estate offices, schools, and government, along with the criminal justice system. But it carries connotations of “hate” and “prejudice” which can be misleading.

Donald Trump advertised his personal racism from the moment he descended his stupid gold escalator in 2015 to announce his candidacy for President in front of a cast of a few dozen extras who had been paid $50 each. He doesn’t think he’s racist because he loves being photographed with Black celebrities: Mike Tyson, Kanye West, Don King, and - of course - Omarosa Manigault. Trump even dated a Black woman in the late 90’s: a model, of course. If you want to know whether he believes African Americans to be capable of doing what he (stunningly and wrongly) believes he is capable of doing, look at the advisors he surrounds himself with. Also listen to his bizarre and tone-deaf appeals to “the Blacks.” 

South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond may have hated Black people, but that didn’t stop him from raping his family’s 16-year old African American maid, Carrie Butler, when he was 22. He paid for college for their daughter Essie, a teacher in the LA Unified School District and a lifelong Delta Sigma Theta, but he never publicly acknowledged her.

Fans of the reality TV show Survivor will remember Colton from the 2012 “Survivor: One World” season. He famously called his Black tribemate “ghetto trash” and told him to get a real job. (Bill was a standup comic.) But Colton was very clear that he couldn’t be a racist because he was close to his Black housekeeper.

All of this is to remind you that, historically, the most powerful white people in America have not  shunned contact with Black people… not at all. We look at the Jim Crow laws of the early 20th century and believe they were about a white distaste for physical proximity to African Americans. No. White families were happy to have Black people prepare and serve their food. They were happy to have them launder their clothes. If you think white people didn’t like to be near African Americans, you will have to explain why they were happy to have Black women nurse their babies.

The central and essential fact of white supremacist rule is power. It may be the power to exploit by underpaying employees. This was most certainly the reason for slavery, but it was also the reason for sharecropping and convict leasing. Offering disparate pay for the same work is still the practice today. And why do you suppose agricultural labor has always been exempted from minimum wage laws?

White supremacist rule may be the power to exploit employees by driving them into work that they would not otherwise choose to do. Even after the federal government passed equal opportunity legislation this was continued through exclusionary union practices. And please do not underestimate the power of immigration law - both creating special classes of work visas and denying visas to many absolutely-essential workers - to drive people into particular jobs.

White supremacy is the power to exploit people by overcharging them for rent because they are excluded from choosing to live wherever they want. It is the power to exploit people by overcharging them for goods because they have limited choices about where to shop.

Until the Civil War white supremacy was codified in the US Constitution as evidenced by the fact that a 14th Amendment had to be adopted in order to bring Constitutional protection to African Americans. In Scott v Sandford (60 US 393, 1857) the Supreme Court described “a class of people with no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” That is not a hostile summary; those are the exact words of Chief Justice Roger Taney in the Court’s majority decision.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, white supremacy was carried out by terrorist attacks: assassinations of political candidates, shootings at polling places, armed coups d’etat. In Wilmington, NC, a mob led by the white business elite took rifles, shotguns, and a Gatling gun from the National Guard armory. They murdered several hundred Black political and social leaders, burned the offices and presses of the Black newspaper, seized control of the City Hall, and expelled their surviving political rivals from town. At least six members of that mob later served as North Carolina Governors; at least three as US Senators. One became Secretary of the Navy under FDR. And that is just one example.

In addition to political terrorism, white supremacy was reinforced periodically by periodic mass rituals. Lynchings were never “rough justice.” They were always spectacles meant to draw boundaries around and lift up whiteness. When 17-year old Jesse Washington was lynched in Waco, Texas in 1916 he had already been tried in a court and sentenced to death. 15,000 people came out on their lunch breaks (in a city of roughly 30,000) to see him beaten, chained, stabbed, hoisted by his neck and burned alive while the mayor and police observed. When Sam Hose was lynched in Coweta County, Georgia in 1899, two thousand people watched in a town of maybe 3500. Wannabe spectators filled trains to make the forty-mile trip from Atlanta, but they arrived late. Multiply these two examples by four thousand, because that is the number of lynchings of African Americans in the US between the end of Reconstruction and 1950. The detective who investigated the Sam Hose case concluded that the murder he was accused of was actually self-defense and that the rape simply never happened. The spectacle of lynching was calculated to show everybody - Black and white - that Black people had no rights that a white person was bound to respect.  The insistence that the victims were “criminals” (regardless of the facts) will be familiar to anybody today who has seen the “he was no angel” trope that gets dragged out in every case of extrajudicial murder of an African American person in order to try the victims for their own murder. Another trope from that time which is still evident today was the bizarre stories in the local press after so many of these spectacle killings warning frightened whites about the possibility of armed African Americans coming to take revenge. The form this takes today is hysterical stories about demonstrations for justice “turning violent,” as if the actual killing wasn’t the turn to violence.

The other mass ritual of white supremacy was the so-called “race riot.” These were often urban phenomena in which mobs of white people invaded Black neighborhoods, with the cooperation of the police, to murder, burn, rob, beat, and rape. Frequently these pogroms1 followed propaganda campaigns in the local press about “crime waves.” That was coded language because the crimes referred to were those by Black people. Perhaps the largest such mass attack was in the rural countryside of the Arkansas Delta in 1919 where the white mobs - assisted by federal troops - killed hundreds of African Americans. Then they indicted 100 more in the courts and sentenced 12 to death by hanging. That massacre was triggered by the formation of a sharecroppers’ union to collectively seek fair settlements with landlords. The press campaign we are seeing right now about “lawlessness” (meaning gangland shootings in Chicago, demonstrations in Portland, and a tick up in the historically-low murder rate in New York) is directly analogous. Today, of course, anti-Black violence has been largely professionalized and assigned to uniformed agents instead of to mobs

In the first half of the 20th century, white supremacy was once again codified in the laws, although it had to be done by subterfuge. States incorporated poll taxes, literacy tests, and complicated rules for voting (eight-box laws) with the understanding that county clerks would enforce these in such a way as to selectively disfranchise Black voters. 

You cannot understand this if you think a white majority discriminated against a Black minority. Most of the people in the states of Mississippi and South Carolina were African American until well into the 20th century. Twenty-six Mississippi counties, mostly in the Delta, are still mostly black; twelve in South Carolina, both in the Low Country and the Piedmont. The eighteen counties of the Alabama Black Belt remain majority-Black today. Seventeen counties in central Georgia have an African American majority. You get the picture. The white elite was disfranchising a Black majority. 90% of African Americans in the United States lived in the South until 1910. So the Jim Crow South was much more comparable to apartheid South Africa than most people are willing to acknowledge.

Control of elections was the essential backstop to all the other systems of social control. As I show above, the segregation laws were not there because white people didn’t want to be near Black people, they were meant to enforce a hierarchy placing all white people above all Black people. And segregation could neither be implemented or enforced in majority-Black communities without controlling the election of judges, sheriffs, and town councils. Those white courts and cops also made it possible for white people to cheat their Black employees, customers, and tenants with complete impunity. They made it possible to round up young men, charge them with spurious crimes, and put them to work for free on the roads, or rent them to farmers and mine operators.

That is why Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer was beaten nearly to death by police and prisoners under police orders in Winona, Mississippi. She had not only beaten a stacked deck by registering to vote; she was encouraging others to do the same. That is why Representative John Lewis was beaten nearly to death in Selma, Alabama. He had brought young people from all over to help with a forty-year long effort to register Black voters in Dallas County. That is why the Alabama State Police shot Deacon Jimmie Lee Jackson to death in Marion, Alabama. He was leading a march for voter registration in Perry County when the police clubbed his grandfather and his mother.2

The murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson and the beatings on the Edmund Pettus Bridge gave enough attention to the issue of disfranchisement that Congress passed a bipartisan Voting Rights Act only five months later. It was introduced by Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen and cleared the filibuster attempts of its (bipartisan) opponents.

By 2013 both the political landscape and the Supreme Court had changed. In Shelby County v. Holder (570 US 529) the Court ruled that the law was based on forty-year old facts and declared it, therefore, to be an unconstitutional inference with the states’ administration of their own elections. But the swift and immediate introduction of new laws for voter suppression as soon as the Court announced its decision proved the exact opposite. Over one thousand polling places were closed in the next five years, mostly in Black-majority counties. Texas, Mississippi, and both Carolinas quickly passed voter ID laws, designed to discourage Black (and, in Texas, Mexican-American) voters. Racial gerrymandering is back, although it often masquerades as partisan gerrymandering because that is not illegal. Opportunities to register to vote have been eliminated in predominantly Black counties.

244 years after the Declaration of Independence, the US is still trying to suppress Black political power. Not everyone recognizes how that document already enshrined white supremacy, because it doesn’t actually mention Black people or slaves. But look closely. The main body of the Declaration is a bill of particulars against King George III for all the ways in which he was tyrannizing the signers. The last of these is relevant to this discussion. It begins, “He Has Excited Domestic Insurrections Amongst Us.” This is euphemistic language. Congress is actually complaining here that the King was inciting Black people to revolt. Immediately after the Battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775, Lord Dunmore, the Royal Governor of Virginia, had the gunpowder moved from the armory in Williamsburg to HMS Magdalen in the James River. A series of crowds gathered at the Governor’s Palace to demand its return. He was initially able to reassure them that he had taken it to keep it out of the hands of rebellious slaves. When they realized that he was just saying the one thing that would frighten them more than disarming their militia, he threatened that if they tried to harm him he would “declare Freedom to the Slaves, and reduce the City of Williamsburg to Ashes.” Representatives to the Continental Congress from Georgia and South Carolina expressed their fear of the same thing. Why couldn’t they just come out and say so? Maybe they were ashamed after their bold opening statement about “all men are created equal. Maybe they were reluctant to admit how much of their rebellion was about defending their ownership (and trade in) people.

1. The word “pogrom” originated in Russia (погро́м) in the early 1880’s to describe similar attacks on Jewish neighborhoods there. It was commonly used in the Black press at the turn of the 20th century to describe these “race riots” in the US.

2. It should surprise no one that State Trooper James Fowler claimed self-defense, saying he thought Deacon Jackson was “going for his gun.” It should surprise no one that he was not charged with Jackson’s murder until forty-two years later, and was sentenced to only six months, of which he served five. It should surprise no one that a year after murdering Deacon Jackson he murdered another Black man, this time inside a police station. It should surprise no one that Fowler again claimed self-defense, this time saying that Nathan Johnson “went for his baton.” It may surprise the reader, though, to discover that James Fowler served five years in a Thai prison for heroin trafficking. 

What do we mean when we use the word racism? (Continued)

The word “racism” has multiple meanings, somewhat related, and the differences in those meanings leads people into some very sterile arguments. It is a 20th century word; there is no known use in print before 1902. It originally referred to a series of pseudoscientific theories about some fixed number of human “races” with distinct biological characteristics that went far beyond skin and hair color or facial features. There was always a hierarchy attached, too. These theories - despite being completely unfounded - were taught in schools and in museum exhibits and were treated as fact well past the Second World War.

The social systems - both legal and customary - of upholding white supremacy and policing that hierarchy have also come to be called racism. These systems actually were the main support of the fake science. Think about it: A color line policed by terror, everyday custom, and actual police confines African Americans to unskilled work except in their own community. White people can then be reinforced in the otherwise-bizarre belief that unskilled work is the biological limit of African American capacity. This second definition is what people mean when they say that racism = prejudice + power. It is the reason people argue that only white people can be racist; that other people may have prejudices, but that they don’t have the power to make turn those prejudices into the structure of society.

A third use is the one that puts people on the other side of that argument. They understand racism to mean dislike of another race. They point to the anti-black sentiments that white supremacy has successfully indoctrinated into so many other people of color and say, “See! These people are racist, too!” They point to the suspicion, resentment, and anger toward white people that so many African Americans have developed after 400 years of white supremacist rule in all its historic forms and say, “See! Black people can be racist, too!” I say this is a sterile argument because the two sides are using the word in different ways. What is decidedly not sterile is the observation that the people who say “You’re racist, too!” are drawing a false equivalence. Even when we have individual African American people holding leading positions (mayors, Representatives, a President of the United States) the system of white supremacy continues to make the relationships asymmetric.

There is another popular usage for the word that is still more problematic. The word racism has come to be identified as a form of hatred. This distracts us from looking at both social systems and their ideological supports. It directs our attention to individuals. It treats what should be understood in terms of political and economic power as the pathology of an individual. But that is not all. It concludes that those individuals are not moved by racism unless they are screaming epithets at others, unless they are burning crosses, unless they are actively participating in lynch mobs. I have made the observation above that a system with a strongly-policed and distinctly hierarchical color line actually encourages white and Black people to come into regular and intimate contact. That contact doesn’t require white people to “hate” Black people. Quite the contrary. Why would a child hate the nanny who raises her? Why would a family hate the cook who prepares their meals? Why would a man hate the servant who accompanies him at all times and assists him with his daily chores? Hate isn’t just unnecessary to white supremacy. For the most powerful white people it is almost inconceivable that they would “hate” people who - as their subordinates - are such close companions in life.

Every day we see the otherwise-incomprehensible spectacle of white people who quite obviously believe that Black people are fundamentally different, inferior, and frightening, but who nevertheless quite sincerely believe that they are not racist, and who are insulted and hurt by the thought that somebody else might think so! “I don’t call them that bad name; why are they saying I’m racist?” “I never personally owned any slaves; why are they saying I’m racist?” Or, in the case of President Donald Trump: I like to have my picture taken with popular Black entertainers and athletes; “I’m the least racist person there is anywhere in the world!” We look at those people and think that they’re lying, both to us and to themselves. But when we say that racism is a form of hate, we allow people to believe that they are free of racism because they are - most of the time - semi-courteous.

I am not going to make a fussy argument for precision in language. People use words the way they use them and we can’t fix that. But I will argue that if we understand the range of meanings a word can have it helps us see more clearly.

What do we mean when we use the word "racism"?

Yesterday I posted a piece briefly contrasting the ways in which American white supremacist rule has worked to suppress Black people, Natives, and Mexican Americans. I wrote it for this space over two years ago, but never shared it because I found it awkward and I thought I could return to it later. This last week or so, though, I have been working on a blog post with similar themes. Being 12 single-spaced pages in - and nowhere near finished - I decided I needed to back off again. But I didn't want to leave the subject. I think it's just too important. So I just posted that old commentary and started again from the beginning.

When Representative John Lewis (D. GA) died eleven days ago of pancreatic cancer the flood of tributes to his life included the real and the fake. I was most appalled by a tweet from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY). Nobody has done more to stymie the agenda John Lewis pursued in life than Mitch McConnell. Lewis spoke strongly, marched, sat-in, and endured savage beatings for racial integration, for justice, and for equality. But the single moment of his life that is most remembered was Sunday, March 7, 1965. On that day Lewis led 500-600 marchers from Selma headed to the state capital in Montgomery to demand that African American people be allowed to register and vote in Alabama. As soon as they crossed the Alabama River at the Edmund Pettus bridge, they were attacked by Alabama State Police and mounted Dallas County possemen, who set about beating the marchers with batons, bats, and knotted ropes. Lewis himself, Amelia Boynton, and 15 others were beaten nearly to death.

Those beatings were seen on national television in an era before routine satellite links. It took hours to fly the films to New York, but when they were put on the air, they interrupted ABS's broadcast of "Judgement at Nuremberg," a film about the trials of Germans who claimed they were "just following orders." The racist stormtroopers in the movie seemed a close parallel to the Alabama troopers and sheriff's posse in the breaking news. So were the "good Germans" and the Americans who had quietly watched the violence against African Americans as if it had nothing to do with them. The following days brought hundreds more people from around the country to join the projected follow-up march. My rabbi was one. My Uncle Martin, an Episcopal priest, was another. On March 15, President Lyndon Johnson gave a televised address in which he called for a Voting Rights Act. Johnson's great talent was pressuring lawmakers and he pushed that transformational bill through Congress.

That was fifty-five years ago. In 2013, the US Supreme Court gutted that Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529) on the grounds that it was based on forty-year old information and therefore obsolete. It's absolute necessity was demonstrated immediately when states that had been under its coverage moved to restrict Black voting with new registration requirements, closed polling and registration sites, and redistricting within a day of the Court's decision. All that would be required to overcome the Court's objection would be a new law, based on current information. But Congressional Republicans have refused even to consider it. The bulwark of that opposition has been Senator Mitch McConnell.

And that is why McConnell's statement really set me off. How dare he honor Congressman Lewis when he has stonewalled any effort to renew what is probably the signature accomplishment of Lewis's long life? Reading it, I noticed this: He remembers Lewis as a leader in the lunch-counter sit-ins. He remembers Lewis as one of the 13 original Freedom Riders, savagely beaten for integrating insterstate buses. He remembers Lewis as one of the Big Six, addressing the historic March on Washington in 1963. How, then, does he fail to remember Bloody Sunday? How, then, does he fail to remember Lewis being beaten on the Edmund Pettus bridge? How, then, does he fail to remember the historic passage of the 1965 Voting Rights... Oh! Lauding Lewis for his role in getting a piece of legislation whose revival McConnell has been blocking for the last seven years is probably a bridge too far even for the massively hypocritical and mealy-mouthed Mitch McConnell.

I posted a quick observation on Facebook, noting what McConnell remembered about Lewis and

what he did not, and I asked, "Why do you suppose that is?" I really thought the connection with the Voting Rights Act was obvious. I really didn't think I had to say that this was about disfranchising Black people, stealing their political power, safeguarding white supremacy in federal and state governments. But the answer I got was "racism." 

Racism means a lot of things. It is especially puzzling here because McConnell actually chose to celebrate Lewis for his opposition to segregation. But there's more.

McConnell, like Lewis, was born and grew up in Alabama. I did not know that a young Mitch McConnell attended the 1963 March on Washington. I did not know that Mitch McConnell was an undergraduate activist for integration at the University of Louisville. And I do not know what the philosophical meaning of McConnell's current intransigence is. He was the surprise confirmation vote for Loretta Lynch as Barack Obama's Attorney General, so maybe he really thinks he believes in racial equality. Or maybe he thinks he believes in it, but can't really accept it, so he resists political power for African Americans. Or maybe, he has simply devolved into the sum of his ambitions and machinations. Maybe this man has no principles at all anymore, no moral center. Maybe the beginning and end of his public life is the pursuit of power for himself and his political party.

I don't know the answer to that question. I do know that I have much more to say about reducing opposition to the Voting Rights Act to the chameleon word "racism." I will follow this up with another post, probably tomorrow.

More than Civil Rights

In the 1980’s, we social studies teachers in New York State taught a class that was called “Minorities and Foreign Policy.” I thought of it as a curriculum of colonialism, because we could look at conquests within and without the continental US: Indians and the Philippines, Black people and Vietnam, Mexican Americans and the Dominican Republic. Do you see the parallels?

But many of my colleagues chose to devote the bulk of the course to foreign policy, largely because they didn’t know anything about the history of ethnic minorities in the United States. They had learned about the Monroe Doctrine and the War of 1812 and the Spanish American War. Everything else was a mystery to them. In fact, one egregiously racist senior teacher insisted that the story of all people of color was discrimination: in housing, in schools, in public accommodations. How much could you keep saying about this? he asked.

I did try to answer this, but most of them weren’t particularly interested. It was really a rhetorical question. Where I could respond to this was in my own classroom. I made every effort to give my students plenty to think about. But I think this is a subject that is poorly understood, even by people who are anti racist. And I think it is worth visiting.

One way of thinking about the trajectories of African American, Native American, and Mexican American people in this country is through the lens of Supreme Court decisions that subjugated them, particularly at the turn of the 20^th century. I choose to look at these three cases:

1. Plessy v. Ferguson 163 US 537 (1896)
2. Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock 187 US 553 (1903)
3. United States v. Sandoval 167 US 279 (1897) 

I think most readers are familiar with Plessy v. Ferguson. The majority held that US anti-discrimination law was unconstitutional! They ruled that segregated train cars for African American riders did not violate the 14^th amendment’s guarantee of equal treatment. In fact, they made the scandalous argument that if there was any “badge of inferiority” associated with forced racial separation, it was because “the colored race chooses to put that construction on it.” The sole dissenter, Justice Harlan, correctly predicted that this decision would eventually be seen to be just as “pernicious” as Dred Scott. The Plessy decision was the judicial basis for the entire edifice of Jim Crow: separate and unequal public accommodations, disfranchisement of African American voters, and the exploitation of sharecrop labor.

Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock addressed the forced allotment of tribal land to individual Native Americans. Lone Wolf, a Kiowa, argued that Congress had no right to unilaterally abrogate the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867, which – in return for surrendering their claim to other lands – reserved territory for the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache, and barred white people for that reservation. Congress acted unilaterally to distribute pieces of that reservation to members of the tribes as personal property, a policy known as “allotment.” The Court decided that allotment was a violation of the treaty, but that Congress had the right because Native Americans were “an ignorant and dependent race!” The actual result of allotment was that Kiowa-Comanche-Apache land was reduced from 2.9 million acres to 3,000 acres. Yes. That is roughly one-tenth of one percent. You can fairly categorize that as theft.

U.S. v. Sandoval was a case arising from the Spanish land grants that created the communities of the current states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada and Utah. These were all part of Mexico until the United States seized them in 1848. Under the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, the residents of those lands were guaranteed that their property would not be disturbed and that they could remain where they were living as citizens of the United States. In this particular suit, the people of San Miguel del Vado argued that the United States had illegally seized their communal forest and pasture lands, leaving them only with their houses and gardens adjacent to the Pecos River. The Court decided that those common lands never belonged to the community, but instead to the Spanish king, and therefore now belonged to the United States.

There is much more to be said about all of these communities than is present in these court cases. Sandoval doesn’t address the issue of disfranchisement or segregation of Mexican Americans. Plessy doesn’t address debt peonage or disfranchisement of African Americans. Lone Wolf only tangentially addresses citizenship for Native Americans. But what these cases point to is the profound difference between the relation between each of these communities and the U.S. government. 

Plessy is a case about second-class citizenship. Already in Dred Scott v. Sandford 60 U.S. 393 (1857) the Court had ruled that African Americans were not citizens. In the memorably-repellent words of Chief Justice Taney, they “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Plessy essentially reinstates that judgement, despite the adoption of the 13^th Amendment (abolishing slavery), the 14^th Amendment (guaranteeing citizenship to African Americans), and the 15^th Amendment (guaranteeing the right to vote to African Americans). The importance of these cases, which are widely considered to be the worst the Court has ever made, shows that white supremacy in this country relied on inventing some special legal category for African Americans and denying them the ordinary legal rights of human beings.

Lone Wolf is a case about treaty rights. It reminds us that Native Americans were sovereign peoples whose relationship with the United States was similar to that of any foreign nation. Each indigenous nation has its own set of treaties with its own history and so the rights of the Mohawk differ from those of the Lakota and those of the Navajo. They include territorial sovereignty in reserved lands along with hunting and fishing rights outside those “reservations.” Despite the Court’s decision in that case that Congress could legally break treaties, Native Americans still possess many treaty rights that are separate from their individual rights since being made citizens by Congress in 1924.

The Sandoval case is a reminder that Mexican Americans are not all immigrants. In the Southwest there is a saying: “We never crossed the border. The border crossed us.” Pretending that people snuck across the river just yesterday when, in fact, their families have lived here since before the American Revolution is a big lie. And it reminds us of so many other ethnicities whose relationship to this country is not so simple. Puerto Rico was taken by the United States in the Spanish American War of 1898. Puerto Ricans are citizens, not immigrants. The Dominican Republic was invaded three times by the U.S. during the 20^th century and ruled by U.S. governors, too. Haiti was governed by the U.S. from 1915-1934, then invaded again in 1994. The fact that these last two countries were never formally annexed amounts to a legal pretext for treating their peoples as if we never met them before.

I don’t mean to claim that this is a comprehensive discussion of the history of minorities in the U.S. I only want to use these cases to point out that there is more to this than fair housing or employment discrimination.