Raising Cain...

Collective shadows and the culture of violence in the United States

This weekend in Selma, Alabama, people have gathered to remember the 50^th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday”. On March 7, 1965 -- in an extreme act of state violence -- Alabama state troopers brutally attacked civil rights marchers as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in an expression of solidarity to secure equal voting rights.

It’s significant to me in light of this collective remembering that by far the strongest connection I made in my reading of An Indigenous People's History of the United States (Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz) and The Cross and the Lynching Tree (James H. Cone) was to violence. From the beginning, violence pervaded colonizers' relationships not only to the land, but with Native Americans, Black people uprooted and brought here as slaves, and, later, any others perceived as a threatening in some way. This behavior – in one form or another – has been carried on against other “enemies” by colonialist descendants.

According to military historian John Grenier, American settlers created a fighting tradition that featured destruction of noncombatants, villages, and agricultural resources. For successive generations of Americans soldiers and civilians, the killing of Indian men, women, and children became a defining element of their first military tradition and thus part of a shared American identity.^[i]

Though this first way of war lost its centrality after 1814, Grenier stresses that Americans must not forget that it has remained part of US military heritage.  In similar ways, the Civil War, strategic bombing of Nazi Germany and Japan in World War II, and the Vietnam War, represent other military campaigns in which the United States “blurred or even erased the boundaries between combatants and noncombatants”.^[ii]

There is another point made by Grenier that I find especially interesting in light of the pervasive shadow (and not-so-shadow) culture of violence that exists in the United States today.

It’s significant, says Grenier, that in the 1790s, settlers tired of what they saw as governmental and Army incompetence to secure the frontier, and so focused on destroying Indian villages and food supplies themselves:

They were unabashed in declaring that their intentions were to drive the Indians from lands on the western side of the Appalachian range and claim those lands as their own, whether the nation-state of the United States wanted them to do so or not.^[iii]

Reading this, I thought about how this vigilante mentality evolved later into lynching of Black people and, to some extent, other minorities. I believe the same shadow of violence found expression through Jim Crow laws, segregation, attacks on voting rights, and, more recently, mass incarceration. Violence (and genocide) against Native Americans continued through the system of reservations, boarding schools, corporate land grabs and broken treaties.

I think it’s likely that many other kinds of both subtle and overt bullying and violence trace back to the same foundations. I think it’s all present anytime institutions or individuals try to make objects out of subjects. In my own profession, for example, I came to understand that diagnosing so-called mental illness by imposing a label based on a DSM checklist is an act of violence. It has nothing to do with life as any person actually lives and experiences it. It is attempted soul murder.

This culture of violence will continue to fragment people, communities and social institutions until we – the collective of US citizenry -- acknowledge the violence that operated beneath the ideals of freedom and brotherhood that we continue to tell ourselves is what America is all about. As a nation, we need to bring our history of violence into the light. Until we can do this, we need to remember all of our bloody Sundays.

---

[i] John Grenier. The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814 (Kindle Edition Locations 185-186, 203-205).

[ii] Grenier, Kindle Edition Locations 251-254).

[iii] Grenier, Kindle Edition Locations 240-245).

 

Related links:

Burying Vietnam, Launching Perpetual War (Christian Appy, 2/8/15)

Race and Revolution: Reckoning with racial injustice past and present (Goodman, 3/5/15)

March 7, 1965: ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Selma, Alabama (Richard Kreitner, 3/7/15)

It's a Non-Stop Land Grab From the American Indians (Bill Moyers, 12/26/14)

 

I'll be writing more about collective shadows and shadow work later; here's a great article in the meantime:

How We Contribute to the Collective Shadow (Diane Hancox, MA; 11/17/11)

 

In this presentation to the US Army War College, John Grenier reads from his book, The First Way of War:

 

 

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On the 30th anniversary of the publication of "The Color Purple," we speak with author, poet and activist Alice Walker about her groundbreaking novel and its enduring legacy. Set mainly in rural Georgia in the 1930s, the book tells the story of a young, poor African-American woman named Celie and her struggle for empowerment in a world marked by sexism, racism and patriarchy. The novel earned Walker a Pulitzer Prize in 1983, making her the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer for fiction. Walker explains the origin of the book’s title and explores some of its central characters and their connection to her own family history.

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Well, I think there might be another word to add to my list of stuff that can't be named: lynching.

In Trayvon Martin and the Deadly Legacy of Vigilantism, Jamilah King interviews Koritha Mitchell about her book, Living with Lynching. Mitchell talks a little bit about Without Sanctuary, James Allen's collection of lynching photographs:

The history of lynching in the U.S is really horrific and painful for a lot of black Americans. Why was it important for you to tell this story, in particular?

As painful as it is, we have not necessarily shied away from it — which I think is a good thing. One of the ways we haven’t shied away from it is through our support of and our facing it through the “Without Sanctuary” exhibition — those gruesome lynching photographs which had a stint at the Martin Luther King, Jr. center in Atlanta. That was one of the bigger moments where people really remarked upon how much black families were coming to it and using it as a way to grieve losses through generations.

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The “Without Sanctuary” photographs are a big reason of why it was important for me to tell the story through the lynching plays because the lynching plays tells us exactly what the photographs cannot tell us because the photographs are from a white perspective. You needed to be somewhat safe at the lynching to take those photographs. You’ve got this isolated black victim surrounded by a mob of righteous-looking whites and that is all that we knew about lynching. But the construction of those photographs is very specific: it’s to make sure that you think this was an isolated man who didn’t have any connection to community. The plays give us a sense of just how connected to community and family those victims were.

via colorlines.com

I happened to see this exhibit when it was at the King center in Atlanta. A few years later I tried to write about it in the post that launched this blog...but I couldn't do it...I couldn't find the words. So I was very interested in Koritha Mitchell's comments on it, and generally how the interview connects some dots between Trayvon Martin's death, and a broader issue of the collective, historical trauma that vigilante actions imposed on African Americans as a group.

What Mitchell says about the photographs representing a white perspective, and the intention of the photos to make us think that "this was an isolated man who didn’t have any connection to community" added some critical pieces to my reflections on Trayvon Martin's murder. This is exactly the point I was making about the power of worldview in relation to maintaining broken systems. The photographs reflect a belief system sees the world as fragmented, isolated parts without connection to the whole. And such a world is deadly.

The other process that speaks to me through Mitchell's words is that of healing and transformation. In the social healing of oppressor-oppressed relationships, there is work that has to be done by each group within itself, and work that will not be complete without collaborative effort. Both pieces are essential. To collaborate effectively, I as a member of the oppressor group have to come to terms with my ancestral linneage and the ways in which I still am consciously or unconsciously identified with the oppressor's worldview. Through collaboration, all of us share dreams, stories, art, action and community that brings valuable new insight to the worlds of self and other, oppressor and oppressed.

I'm still not sure what to say about my experience viewing the "Without Sanctuary" exhibit, but I'll start with this: There is a certain trauma that comes with the realization of horrors perpetrated on another human being by one's own group. Opening up to that is difficult, and I think one thing "Without Sanctuary" represented for me is a point of no return. I can't go back to ignorance of what happened. I can only keep moving forward as fast as I can stand it.

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Hurricane Katrina was a powerful visual cue that Republicans are not the allies for black interests. In a matter of days it returned black voters solidly to the Democratic fold. Less than two years later Democrats won a majority in Congress. And in the next presidential election black voters formed the coalition base for the election of the first African-American president.

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