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.

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[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:

 

 

Related articles

Lessons in the Language | The Media Co-op

Re-name Selma Edmund Pettus bridge, petition

Truth and reconciliation, honor and healing, and another leap into the deep end of the pool

The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism —the founding of a state based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy of genocide and land theft. -- Roxanne Dubar-Ortiz in An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (Revisioning American History) (p. 2, Kindle edition).

I wrestle with questions about black dignity in a world of white supremacy because I believe that the cultural and religious resources in the black experience could help all Americans cope with the legacy of white supremacy and also deal more effectively with what is called “the war on terror.” If white Americans could look at the terror they inflicted on their own black population—slavery, segregation, and lynching—then they might be able to understand what is coming at them from others. Black people know something about terror because we have been dealing with legal and extralegal white terror for several centuries. Nothing was more terrifying than the lynching tree. -- James H. Cone in The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Kindle edition).

  Slave trader's business in Atlanta, Georgia, 1864. Photo by George N. Barnard [Wikipedia]

 

Earth has a long and troubling history of oppression and exploitation -- humans against one another, the land, air, water and other species. Fortunately, humanity has many ways to bring love and justice to bear on the consequences. As a justice activist, I’ve engaged in a lot of them, but the focus that has inspired me most and longest is that of healing and transformation, both personal and planetary.

Events that have unfolded or intensified in the past few months -- police brutality and resistance to it emerging with the #BlackLivesMatter movement, Native American and First Nations resistance to the KXL Pipeline, corporate land grabs and other challenges to sovereignty and protection of sacred lands -- lead me to believe it’s time for another leap into the deep end of the pool. I’m thinking that this will take the form of a personal truth and reconciliation (honor and healing) process.

Specific ideas about this came in moments of introspection, but they clearly were infused with voices calling from the frontlines of the resistance. I thought about my connections to these struggles, connections beyond those that have come as a result of involvement in social and environmental justice work.

 

Photograph from the mid-1870s of a pile of American bison skulls waiting to be ground for fertilizer. [Wikipedia]

 

Among my ancestors were settlers who arrived here on the Mayflower. And some who were slave holders. I am a descendant of colonists, people who anchored ideas and values of white supremacy into this land and built a nation upon them. Sometimes it's difficult, in light of ongoing oppression and exploitation in the United States and elsewhere, to integrate the realities of my lineage. But for reasons that I’ll explore in a future post, distancing from ancestors delays transformation and healing -- for everyone.

I’ll also detail in a future post how I determined where to jump in. For now, the short story: on November 27^th last year, while others came together to celebrate Thanksgiving, I curled up alone with An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Just before Christmas of 2014, I found the portal into the past of my slave-holder ancestors through The Cross and the Lynching Tree, by James H. Cone.

The ideas in these books don’t support the version of American history or the “American Dream” I grew up with. As I write this post, I have finished both books. The places they took me were intense and, some of them, unexpected.

Joe Brewer: The War on Women and What to Do About It

I really liked Joe's presentation because it connects some dots between sound bytes in the "war on women" and the larger systemic ground of patriarchy in which it is being waged:

 

Cognitive Policy Works (Joe's website)

How the War on Women Became Mainstream (the article that inspired Joe to make this video)

Melissa Harris Perry: Is Newt Gingrich Right About Black Voters?

As I see the Republican Party slide more toward what I'd call the lunatic fringe, I've certainly thought more about how those of us who still hold out hope for a racially-just America can reach across colorlines -- and any other lines we have to reach across -- to ditch the craziness and get on with rebuilding a system that works for everybody.

That's why I was interested in this article by Melissa Harris-Perry that recently appeared in The Nation. I'm looking forward to reading the book she references here as well:

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.

But as memories of Katrina become more distant and the reality of a black president becomes more routine, the possibility of shifting partisan alliances may re-emerge. In his forthcoming book, Not in Our Lifetimes, political scientist Michael Dawson maps the electoral consequences of the racial divide that reopened following Katrina. He shows that although black Americans responded with enthusiastic support for Obama’s candidacy, his election alone will not reverse decades of loosening attachment to Democrats. It is too early to predict whether black voters will go to the polls at the same levels they did in 2008, but Democrats should not take black votes for granted. The detachment of even a small percentage of African-Americans in the next election would be a boon for Republicans. It is not necessary for African-Americans to become Republican voters; only that they fail to become voters at all.

via www.thenation.com

Fallout of Hate Is Spreading Across America from "Ground Zero" | | AlterNet

A great article by AlterNet's Joshua Holland talks about origins of the "ground zero" terminology and how many people in the United States are choosing to deal with unresolved collective trauma by hateful treatment of Muslim-Americans. Later today I'll launch a series of related posts on our need symbolize collective trauma rather than re-enact it.

Excerpt from Holland's article (read the whole thing here):

Scientists building the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos referred to the coordinates where a test device was detonated as “point zero.” When the horror of nuclear warfare was unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the term “Ground Zero” entered our lexicon. The expression has come to mean the epicenter of a catastrophic event, be it a nuclear detonation, a disease epidemic or an earthquake. It is the point from which damage spreads, whether it’s radioactive fallout or a deadly contagion.

That the site of the World Trade Center has come to be known as Ground Zero illustrates how the American public has come to fetishize the attacks of 9/11. It’s not an apt analog for the physical destruction that resulted from the attacks on the World Trade Center. But it is an appropriate metaphor for the virulent and socially acceptable bigotry against Muslim Americans that has radiated out from Ground Zero and spread across the United States.

via www.alternet.org

t r u t h o u t | "The Price That We Pay" - Undocumented Immigrants and Taxation

Yana Kunichoff launched the first of a 3-part series on immigration yesterday at Truthout. This article illustrates a problem I have with all the knee-jerk responses being legislated in Arizona, Tennessee and other states: immigration, immigrant rights and how this all relates to fundamental human rights and persistent structural racism in the United States is very complex. As a national collective we need a lot of discussion and de-mythifying, a lot of open-minded and open-hearted listening as we undertake serious, compassionate and just immigration reform.

Kunichoff's first article takes a look at some of the not-so-obvious truths that make immigration issues so complex:

Rita, a 47-year-old Hispanic woman, may in fact be the blueprint for a growing number of Mexican-American immigrant lifestyles: Rita is an undocumented immigrant, and a taxpayer.

According to her 2009 tax return, the divorced mother of three, who asked that her last name not be used for fear of prosecution, made $18,295.68 of which $1,170.41 was withheld for Social Security tax and $273.73 for Medicare - benefits that Rita is unlikely to ever see.

Read the whole article here.

If You Ain’t White – get ready to carry papers in Arizona - Jack & Jill Politics

When have the handcuffs ever been ON POLICE?

I just want to know. From where I’ve lived all my life, Police could pretty much do whatever the hell they wanted to. So, there are places in America where they’ve been ‘ handcuffed’?

I call bull on this. This is nothing but a straight up legalization of racial profiling.

via www.jackandjillpolitics.com

Cathie's notes: Great blog post by rikyrah at Jack and Jill Politics. Here are some links to other articles coming out on Arizona's passage of SB 1070:

Arizona legislature sends immigration bill to gov

Religious Groups Condemn Arizona's In humane Anti-Immigrant Law

Arizona's Harsh Crackdown on Immigrants May Be the Spark the Immigration Reform Movement Needs

Huckabee: New Law Will Open Arizona Up to a 'Lawsuit Bonanza'

Arizona Cracks Down on Immigration, but Congress Unlikely to Act

And here's my post on another blog: So what kind of shoes does an illegal immigrant wear?

What White People Fear | | AlterNet

Understanding the fears behind the racial politics of both conservative and liberal whites can help change a society in which wealth and well-being are still tied to race.

via www.alternet.org

Cathie's notes: This article by Robert Jensen, a professor of journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, was written for the Spring 2010 issue of Yes! Magazine.

As a white liberal on an anti-racist journey, I found it to be interesting, informative, challenging and inspiring.

Read the whole article here. Read more in the America: The Remix issue at Yes! Magazine online here.