Word Salad

 I don't know Jason Whitlock personally so I have no idea whether he actually believes the stupid shit that comes out of his mouth. There are more than enough media provocateurs out there who will say anything to attract comment because it raises their profile (and income) so it's hard to discern.

Maybe Whitlock is one of them. Or maybe he actually thinks the murder of George Floyd was a "race hoax." Maybe he still believes Derek Chauvin will never be convicted. Maybe he really thinks losing weight is better than any vaccine for preventing COVID-19. I don't know.

Yesterday, though, he went on Twitter with the following word salad:

LeBron James, like other elites, is using racial division as a distraction as elites reshape America to be more like communist China. Elites prefer communism. Millionaire elites are protected by communism. They're the "Talented Tenth" W.E.B. Du Bois promoted. You're being played.

What? Where do you start with this? I have no idea who this is even meant to appeal to. If you can make any sense of it, consider his follow up:

Du Bois = communist elite. Communism = hostile to all religion. Communism makes it nearly impossible to rise above your birth class. Maybe you'll hit genetics lottery and become a pro athlete... Democracy-capitalism-freedom-America more class elevation than any other country.

Again, huh? 

There are no victors when we engage in a battle of wits with the unarmed. I will make the following points, though:

• The phrase "talented tenth" originated with white Baptist missionaries like John D. Rockefeller
• When Du Bois embraced that term (his essay "The Talented Tenth" was published in 1903) he was a staunch anticommunist
• By the time Du Bois became a communist (he joined the CPUSA in 1961, at the age of 93) he had long rejected the idea that African Americans should follow the leadership of their most privileged strata
• Marxism advocates a classless society. China is a one-party state led by people who like to call themselves communist as the US calls itself a republic while actively suppressing voting rights and incarcerating five times more people per capita than China.
• The US ranks only twenty-seventh in the world in social mobility, below all of the social democratic countries.

The trope that says racism is primarily a distraction, created by the ruling class to divide us, is mainly a feature of the white left. The right tends to alternate between actively propagating white supremacy and arguing that there is no racism. The meeting point between those two is their bizarre charge that the only racists are those who call attention to racism, those who - in their revealing expression - "play the race card."

Among leftists, on the other hand, (at least nowadays, they were worse 100 years ago) there is a general acknowledgement that systemic racism exists and that it is bad. But there is also a strong trend that believes that its main purpose is to keep the working class divided. These people look at slavery and imperialism and somehow miss the fact that capitalism itself is based on defining some people as religiously or racially less than human, people who can be murdered, raped, and robbed with impunity. They fail to see that capitalism was and is based on the superexploitation of a class of people with "no rights a white man is bound to respect" as Chief Justice Taney wrote in the Dred Scott decision.

Leftists who are blind to the fundamental role of racism in capitalism see it only as dividing the working class, allowing white people to identify with the capitalist class and Black people to think capitalism will be just fine if it includes them. When these class-issues-first leftists insist on muting discussion of topics they consider "divisive" (skin privilege, police impunity) they turn themselves into propagandists for white supremacy, whether they intend to or not.

Jason Whitlock, though, represents another phenomenon entirely. He is pro-capitalism and denies the existence of racism. He somehow conflates the Du Bois of 1900 with the Du Bois of 1960 to pretend that Chinese crony capitalism's dependent on fighting for Black lives!!?? He somehow thinks that US corporate capitalism is egalitarian (?!) because it allows 1% of Americans to own one-third of all wealth in the country while half of Americans own less than 2%. He somehow believes that LeBron James, who has parlayed his talent on the court to spectacular wealth of roughly $500 million (a fortune which fails, by far, to get him onto the Fortune 400 list) is - apparently because he believes that Black Lives Matter - more of an "elite" than all the people who are on that list. 

I would like to ignore tweets like the ones above. I would like to believe that they are too bizarre to matter. But I found myself writing this anyway. I hope that doesn't reflect too badly on me.

More on Division and Solidarity (and to tracing old photos!)

The news is so grim every day. This morning I awoke to find that of the eight people murdered by the latest young, white, male gunman (this time at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis) four of them were Sikhs: Amarjeet Johaol, Jaswinder Kaur, Amarjit Sekhon, and Jaswinder Singh. Since the armed, violent, and already-known-to-police killer had actually worked for a time at this place it is not a stretch to assume that he knew that 90% of the employees were Sikhs. Since he has eyes it is not a stretch to think he noticed that three of the four people he killed were over sixty years old.

Since 9/11, violence against Sikhs in this country has often been misplaced (displaced?) hatred of Muslims because racists see the dastār (turban) and think, "Oh, 

Osama Bin Laden!" It isn't associated with other anti-Asian hate because we tie that to certain distinctive racial features. But among the first things I saw on Twitter was this: "The Stop Asian Hate crowd needs to speak up." Then the observation that when they don't "it reveals a lot."

I have observed before in this space that one of white supremacy's great achievements is turning those excluded from whiteness against one another. I have no doubt that there are Asian Americans who think that South Asians don't count, just as there are South Asians who are certain that they are white. I have certainly written about African Americans who exclude Africans and West Indians from blackness and about Africans and West Indians (including Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans) who agree.

It seemed like I was on a different subject when I noticed a Facebook post about Black cowboys. It was accompanied by a photograph I recognized, though. But I recognized it as a photograph of Black soldiers. A Google image search didn't help me track the provenance of the photo. In fact, almost every iteration of that photo listed was meant to illustrate one or another point about
Black cowboys. I was once again frustrated by my weaknesses in collecting all my notes in one place and thoroughly documenting their sources because I knew I had seen this photo during my research for my books.

MHS Research Center Photo Archives #957-994

I was eventually able to find an only partially cropped version of this photo, but the text that the user added (inaccurate, by the way) meant that the image search I conducted only revealed a few uses of that particular superimposed caption and - interestingly - none of the many I had found that referred to these men as cowboys. Once again, as in my last posting, I couldn't retrace my steps even now, two hours later, but I eventually discovered the original in the photo archives of the Montana Historical Society. This photo of troopers of the 10th Cavalry under General Wesley Merrit was taken in 1894 by A.B. Coe. They were lunching in the St. Mary Valley during an expedition to what is now Glacier National Park. This uncropped version certainly makes the men look more like soldiers than cowboys, both because it is more obvious that they are wearing uniforms and because of their weapons.

What connection am I drawing between the divisive practices of white supremacy and this photo of Black cavalrymen in Montana? In 1894, the St. Mary Valley was part of the reservation of the Piegan Blackfoot tribe. That summer, George Bird Grinnell was negotiating with them to cede the territory to the federal government in order to create a Glacier National Park. The name Grinnell may not be familiar to you. At the time he was a highly regarded conservationist, sport hunter, and ethnographer. He was a prolific writer on Native American culture: among his better-known works are Pawnee Hero Stories and Folk Tales, Blackfoot Lodge Tails, and By Cheyenne Campfires. He was also a champion of the national parks and especially Glacier. His close friendship with Theodore Roosevelt gave him special influence in that area.

John Taliaffero's 2019 biography, Grinnell: America's Environmental Pioneer and His Restless Drive to Save the West, provides a detailed account of what Grinnell was doing that summer. I will just summarize by saying he was bullying the Blackfeet into surrendering their valley. He had known them personally for years. He had made repeated and extended visits to explore the area, hunt, and interview them for his ethnography. The government considered him a great asset in the negotiations to shrink the reservation.

In his 2001 work Crimes against Nature Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation, Karl Jacoby discussed how the creation of parks redefined their occupants as criminals. He particularly looked at the Havasupai Indians of the Grand Canyon. Just this week The Atlantic published an article by David Treuer titled "Return the National Parks to the Tribes." Among his points was that they would be better stewards of this land that was seized from them. The catastrophic fires of recent years, fires that were exacerbated by over a century of suppressing Native burning practices, certainly support that view.

But let me work my way back around to my point. Those Black cavalrymen were in the St. Mary Valley to support George Bird Grinnell in his effort to convince the Piegan Blackfoot tribe that they had no alternative but to cede the land that became Glacier National Park. The soldiers did not make that policy. They weren't even the ones "negotiating." In point of fact, their officers were all white.* Nevertheless, when we celebrate the achievements of Black soldiers and applaud these photographs without, at the same time, recognizing how they serve racial capitalism, we make ourselves party to it. 

Again, my Twitter feed has been full of partially-digested facts about the slave-owning tribes of the Indian Territory and their ongoing exclusion of Black members from voting and other tribal participation. If the same people who happily share these posts aren't also critical of the hero-worship of Buffalo Soldiers as "Indian fighters" then they, too, contribute to white supremacy and to cultivating division instead of solidarity.