Consider this: Fifty hooded white men surrounded David Walker's farmhouse and demanded that he come out for a whipping. He refused and fired a warning shot. They torched his house, burning one son alive and then shot Walker, his wife, and his other four children when they escaped the fire. Walker's two-and-a-half-acre farm was resurveyed into his white neighbor's property. A white lady owns it today.
We read this and are horrified. But when we read that 15 million acres of Black-owned farmland dropped to 1 million over the course of the 20th century, they are very big numbers and harder to assimilate and understand. So imagine instead 153 families whipped out or burned out or murdered out of their little farm every day... for a hundred years. That is what those numbers mean.
Consider this: Ernest Burkhart, a white Texan, moved to Oklahoma to get a job on the oil rigs. He married Mollie Kyle, an Osage woman. Burkhart's uncle then contracted the murders of Mollie's sisters, Anna and Minnie, her mom, her cousin Henry, and her brother-in-law, which made Mollie the owner of all their oil-rich land. Meanwhile Ernest was poisoning his wife so that he and his uncle could take it all.
We read this and it is hard to imagine the calculation and cruelty that allows people to be intimate over a protracted period with those they are robbing and killing. But it is harder still to multiply that by the millions of white people who swindled and murdered and robbed millions of Native people of their farms and ranches. Not treaty land; privately-owned, deed-recognized land that had been assigned as compensation for the previous theft of treaty land.
Consider this: Texas Rangers under the command of Captain James Fox searched the village of Porvenir for stolen property of which there was none. They confiscated two firearms and arrested two men, who they eventually released. Two nights later the Rangers returned with a posse of white civilians and eight US Cavalrymen. They pulled everybody out of bed, then marched 15 men and boys to a nearby hill. They murdered Manuel Morales, Román Nieves, Longino Flores, Alberto García, Eutimio Gonzales, Macedonio Huerta, Tiburcio Jaques, Ambrosio Hernández, Antonio Castanedo, Pedro Herrera, Viviano Herrera, Severiano Herrera, Pedro Jiménez, Serapio Jiménez, and Juan Jiménez. The deed for 1600 acres of land held by Manuel Morales vanished and the land became the property of one of those possemen.
This is a grotesque atrocity, finally commemorated by a historic marker a hundred years after the fact. But it is one atrocity. It has to stand in for the remarkable fact that millions of acres of land that was privately owned by Mexicans when the United States assumed government of the US southwest is now owned by Anglos or by the US Forest Service. Some was taken by murder, as at Porvenir. Some was taken in fraudulent title transfers. Some was simply reassigned by the Supreme Court from its owners to the federal government as in United States v. Sandoval, 167 U.S. 278 (1897).
People are in the habit of looking at white supremacy as prejudice backed by power. They look at job discrimination and housing discrimination. They look at the way children are treated in school. They look at portrayals in TV and movies. They look at differences in the way people are policed based on their race. And all those things are real. All those things are serious.
But white supremacy is also about a violent expropriation of wealth. It is also about murder and theft. In the cases I allude to above, only Ernest Burkhart and his Uncle William Hale were ever charged or tried. Those two were sentenced to life, but they were paroled. In the cases of millions of other thefts and beatings and swindles and killings the white neighbors who were sheriffs and prosecutors and judges and jurors either participated in the crimes themselves or looked away. All those heirs who like to talk about the "hard work" of their forebears who did things the "right way" are either still in possession of the property or they benefited from its sale. When historians look for the archives so they can trace the title transfers they are met - again and again - with "unfortunate fires" or "tragic flooding" that destroyed those records, way back long ago.
When people say that US wealth was built on theft and murder it is not an exaggeration. Nor is it ancient history. This all took place in the lifetimes of people still living. The stolen wealth is the property of individuals who are alive today. Is it a wonder that they don't want to discuss it?
No comments:
Post a Comment